Making Nice

by Matt Sumell

  Back at the house I wandered around looking for Steve but the only thing I found was more mess. I went to ask my father if he’d seen him but instead inquired about a torn lampshade on a bladeless ceiling fan on a half-completed jigsaw puzzle on a broken chair in the dining room. “Lee’me alone!” he yelled, then stalked around the kitchen jerking open cabinet doors like he was checking to see if I’d glued them shut or not. He eventually found what he was looking for, a flea fogger, which he set off and tossed in my direction like a grenade. “You fuck!” I said, then fled coughing out the front door to call for backup, Tara answering the phone and doing her best to talk me down, which didn’t work ’cause I find her voice annoying and ’cause when she asked what was wrong I said, “This place is more fucked up than your vagina is what.” She coughed and hung up, and when I called back my brother answered.

  “Hey bro,” he said.

  “Hi bro,” I said.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Well the house is trashed and flea-infested and he just tried to kill me with chemical weapons.”

  “No, I mean the toupee.”

  I gave an honest assessment—it looked like someone glued fake hair to a jerk’s head—and told him about the flea fogger while tossing a pinecone onto the garage roof and catching it when it rolled off, but eventually it got stuck in the gutter. He said he’d talk to him, and did, and it resulted in our father agreeing to hire an exterminator as long as I cleaned up the house, which is how I spent day two of my recon mission: vacuuming. Also: sweeping, scrubbing, paper-toweling, sorting, pile-making, Steve-hunting—he was in the basement taking a shit on some fallen fiberglass insulation—and throwing things in the garbage, then hiding the garbage in the garage so my father wouldn’t sort through it when he got home from work. By the time I was through my lower legs looked like something the Hubble Telescope captured, a far-off solar system, a distant galaxy, a constellation of fleabites. I was pretty sure I had the plague and lung cancer, so when the ponytailed dude with the mini-keg of poison showed up and told me I’d only need to be gone for four hours I decided to make it more and caught the train to the city to put some distance between me and there, to get some perspective on things, also to drink my head off—which I did in a Midtown bar I don’t remember the name of, staring at a jar of olives, and a jar of cherries, and a jar of lemons, and a plate of sugar, and a jar of limes going brown around the edges.

  * * *

  My father picked me up at the Babylon station in the morning and asked why I was back so early. I said it was because I wanted to spend time with him, and he literally flinched. “You’re my Dada,” I said. “My Daddykins. Your balls made half of me, so we’re bonded forever through all of eternity, and no matter what you do I will always be your firstborn son, and I will always love you and worry about you no matter what horrible and selfish things that you do. I forgive you your trespasses, and I hope that you forgive me mine. Amen.”

  “Knock it off,” he said.

  “Only because I love you,” I said, smirking at the heat haze doing its shimmering thing on the highway in front of us.

  “Be a good day for a ride up the river,” my father said.

  “Yeah. It would. If only we had a boat.”

  “I got a boat,” he said. “Bought it off Wally Johnson a few months ago.”

  He’d never mentioned this and I thought he might be joking me.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it works?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s in the water?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we can take a ride?”

  “If you shut your fuckin’ mouth.”

  “Deal,” I said and shut my fuckin’ mouth, and we pit-stopped for bathrooms and beer and headed to the dock to take a ride.

  * * *

  The boat was straight from the seventies, a sixteen-foot, gel-coatless and oxidized blue MFG covered in pine needles, a rusting can of WD-40 on the dash. A poor replacement for the boats I grew up with but I was more excited than not anyhow. He climbed aboard and started tinkering with I don’t know what, making a production out of the very uncomplicated process of starting up a sixty-horse Evinrude outboard, I think to try and demonstrate his seamanship or something, his mastery of all things marine. I don’t know, but I went along with it as he twiddled about, instructing me on the This and the That and the key-safety thing, saying, “You gotta put this here before you start it or else it won’t start, OK? And this is the throttle, and the warm up lever, and this is the choke,” he said. “You gotta push it in here, like this.” Then he pushed the key in a few times, the carbs clicking away behind us as he did so.

  “Yes sir captain sir,” I said, stepping on a stuck up sprinkler head and feeling nostalgic all of a sudden, which I try not to do and usually don’t. But this was how it was when I was a kid.

  “And this is the radio and the bilge pump switches,” he said.

  “Yes sir,” I said, climbing aboard. “It’s hot out here.”

  “And the nav lights…”

  “Yeah … can see that too. Want a beer?”

  “Are you listening?” he said. “This is the … the…”

  “What about that?” I said, pointing to an Oakdale Hardware bucket with a crushed-up diet-soda can and a screwdriver rusting in rainwater in it. “What’s that for?”

  “Shut up and pump the fuel primer, smart-ass.”

  I crouched and did as I was told, and he started the engine and throttled it up, the Evinrude spewing a gray cloud of exhaust that hung in the air in front of me like some kind of specter from my past, because it was some kind of specter from my past, the sight and smell of it recalling for me the summer days when I was six- or seventeen and he was fifty-something and we were both happier people.

  And before I knew it we were slowly motoring our way up the mile and change of Connetquot River without a word, preferring instead the sound of the Evinrude doing its job of propelling us through the brackish brown water, sipping beer and searching the pine and maple roots on the muddy banks for the painted turtles I remember sunning themselves, the painted turtles that would splash down as we passed by on our family voyages to Fire Island or further, the sound of our wake slapping the shore. But there were no turtles now, or trout or perch or snapper, not like there used to be anyway, no crab traps marked with soda-bottle buoys, no fathers and sons on the docks with chicken, string, and net. When I think back on that trip now I don’t even remember hearing crickets or cicadas, just the engine grumbling low and dirty, the exhaust bubbling up through the murky water as we went. The nature of the place, as I knew it as a kid, is all or mostly all gone now, and as we motored up the river it made me sad to know it.

  A quarter mile down there’s a square of white paint halfway up the trunk of a maple tree on the west side of the bank to mark the channel, and my father insisted that I head across to the opposite shore despite it being high tide and the dinghy he’d bought only drew half a foot.

  “Aim for that empty lot there,” he said, pointing.

  “Yes sir,” I said, not changing a thing except for my empty beer with a new one.

  Another quarter mile down is a small island that was created when the Vanderbilts had the river dredged. The footbridge connecting it to the mainland had been in disrepair for decades, so the only way to access it was by boat or crawl stroke, ice skates in a cold-enough winter. It’s messy and overgrown, but there’s an old bench in the middle of it you can get to if you push through the low growing stuff, and the only reason I know all this is cause my good pal Marc Bachman lost his virginity on that bench to a high school senior named Vanessa Rodriguez. He told us about it the next morning in homeroom, all us idiots in slack-jawed awe at his daring and his triumph.

  “How’s Marc doin’?” my father asked.

  “Stayed with him last night,” I said. “He’s OK, considering.” It’s all I could think to say.

  “Sad,” my father said.<
br />
  We motored passed Nicholl’s Point, the Snapper Inn, and the Riverview, weaving our way around the million-dollar behemoths that leave their slips just once or twice a year to moor out at the mouth of the river, some of them lashed together in groups of three or four or five with middle-aged women in bikinis sunning themselves on impossibly white decks while their big-bellied husbands drink canned beer in the cockpit of the biggest. I couldn’t help but feel slightly embarrassed at the tiny thing I was steering around them as they waved friendlily, one of the unspoken rules of casual boating: wave at everyone.

  “I miss the sailboat, man,” I said. “And Trumpetfish. This thing’s kinda—”

  “If you don’t like it swim.”

  “No,” I said. “No, you’re right. You’re right.”

  Five feet before the piling that marks the end of the no-wake zone he nodded at me, and I throttled it forward as far as it would go, the bow of our little boat raising up then planing out quicker than I thought she would. I backed it down a bit, already feeling better to be bouncing over the wakes of the bigger boats coming in, and soon enough we were free and clear in the windblown Great South Bay, the hot sun shimmering on the surface of the water as far as I could see. I was staring off into the twinkling distance when my father leaned across and shouted, “Where we goin’?!”

  “Who cares!” I yelled back, then finished the last of my beer and dropped the crushed-up can to the deck.

  * * *

  Lazyjack’s in Sayville was like most waterfront clam shacks on Long Island, overpriced hepatitis threats run by dickheads. But the view was decent and they had Blue Point on tap, and by the time the steamers came out my father had finished his second and become a different man. It was just this total loosening and release from the white noise of the last few days together and months apart. We were transported, changed, all was forgiven. Two beers, a bowl of steamers, and a boat on the Great South Bay. Ta-da and wah-lah, as my mother would say. Magic.

  I didn’t dare tell him how great it was to see him like this, lucid and talkative, not completely awful to be around, because I didn’t want to jinx it or worse, clue him into my new theory: he’s a better person when he’s drunk. He’d quit completely six months after Mom died, was sober and unbearable for a full year until he happened upon a tray of weed brownies in the freezer I’d bought to help with her appetite, then forgotten about in my grief and pill-popping. He ate two whole ones not knowing what they were, drove to 7-Eleven for cookies, and spent the entire night in the parking lot.

  “I thought I was fuckin’ dyin’ maaaaaan,” he said over the phone. “And it was great!”

  I started sending him edibles from local dispensaries in the mail and feeding them to him on holidays, because it offered him a little escape, a different perspective, changed his life-lenses and all that. But he didn’t take to it like drinking. He enjoyed weed, but it made him retreat into himself and get quiet. Drinking brought him out, made him social, easier to be around. And here he was half-drunk and happy for the first time in a long time, and all of a sudden eager to get somewhere else, a guy who hadn’t been eager to do or see anything for the better part of two years. So, when he was taking another piss I paid the bill and headed back to the boat, him behind me on the dock as I climbed aboard and started her up. He was even moving better now, more ankle, less wobble. How it used to be. The boat tipped under his weight as he stepped down into it, the hull slapping the water as he sat on the cooler beside me, then again as he stood to undo the lines and shove us off.

  “Where to?” he said.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Ever been to Fatfish?”

  “Don’t think so. Where’s that?”

  “Bayshore.”

  “OK. Let’s go to the Fatfish.”

  “The Fatfish,” I repeated, just because. The same reason I asked the two kids fishing at the end of the pier if they’d caught anything as we puttered past. The littlest one, a tiny girl in an oversized orange life jacket and pink ball cap reached into a bucket half as high as her and pulled out one small snapper, its silver scales reflecting the sun like a dull mirror. I hadn’t seen one in a long time, fifteen years maybe, and I hadn’t expected it. She might as well have been holding a tiny dragon.

  My father yelled, Heyyyyyyyyy! and clapped, and then I clapped, too, and we kept clapping until she bent down and placed it back in her bucket and, still bending, waved goodbye as we headed out and then west, the Causeway Bridge barely visible in the blue and gray distance.

  * * *

  It was his idea, my father’s, his yellows and grays in a grin as he said it, said, “Jump it,” like whatever, like nothing, like pass the salt. But he stood right after and grabbed the windshield as we came up on the thing, the both of us saying oh shit but not at the same time, staggered, one of us echoing the other, and then him just repeating “shit” when it was right in front of us, the wake of the ferries so big that my pals and I would try to surf it on the sandbars off Ocean Beach when the Atlantic went flat, the whole fleet of them eighty- or ninety-foot forty-ton double-deckers built to transport people and cargo across the stretch seeing that there’s no car access, and always followed by a gang of seagulls pitching and diving at tossed pieces of bread by those lucky enough to get a spot topside and stern. Knee-high, easy, one to two feet, in any case more than enough to launch us up and out of the water like a dud rocket, nose-up, the entire boat airborne for one or two seconds that felt like three or four, the engine revving louder as the prop came free and out, the little boat pitching left before coming down with such a thud the windshield cracked up the middle and the bucket and the screwdriver and the Diet Coke can bounced out and into the bay along with some other weight we were leaving behind, spiritual rust but less stupid sounding, the Igloo cooler breaking loose of the plastic bracket as my father fell to the deck laughing, and me laughing too as I aimed us toward the red-and-white awning on the opposite shore.

  By now we were a real sight, two sloppy sunburned idiots tying up an ugly little boat between a beautiful-looking Steiger Craft and a brand new Parker, not even bothering with the bumpers anymore, my father doing his best sober-guy on a makeshift ladder of two-by-fours nailed into the bulkhead, and me on-the-ready underneath in case he fell backward. He didn’t. Instead he got his prosthetic leg up and sprawled himself flat-out on the dock, then lady push-upped his way to standing. I followed him up only to climb back down when he told me he forgot his glasses, and by the time I found them and made it to the bar he’d already ordered fried calamari and a round of Blue Points. I once-overed the menu and added a glass of water.

  “Only pussies drink water,” my father said too loudly, and the handsomely dressed water-sipping couple to our right leered at us. I smiled and blinked at them till they turned away, then clinked my pint glass against my father’s and poured some beer into my warm feeling face. It was good, and judging by the foam dripping off his beard and the high-pitched noise that came out of his mouth, he thought so too.

  But the light had taken on a strange quality. The afternoon thunderheads were rolling in so fast it felt like time lapse, their bottoms eleven hundred shades of gray and their tops billowing bright white, their shadows moving on the surface of the water like giant sea creatures. The gulls were floating on the breeze and fighting over dropped french fries and shitting the pilings white, and the two of us were drinking ourselves drunker and watching it all from a table in the corner where there wasn’t much left to say to each other, the two of us drinking faster in an attempt to salvage whatever it was we could both feel fading, my father every so often repeating a story he’d already told me until the calamari showed up and he stuffed them in his mouth three and four at a time. I suppose I was getting tired, too.

  “Look at you,” he said. “You even yawn mad.”

  “I can’t help that … that’s my face. That’s what my face does when I yawn.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “None of my girlfriends are good-l
ooking enough,” I said, trying to make light. It was something I read in a Leonard Michaels story, the reason a would-be suicide gave for wrecking his car on purpose. But my father didn’t laugh, just sipped his beer and waited for a better answer, and I sipped mine thinking of one. “Sometimes the whole world seems broken, you and me included. It knots my brain up in such a way I get mad. But I know it’s not like that … look at today. Look at Fatlegs. I’m an uncle now, you’re a grandfather. That’s something.”

  “Not enough.”

  “Well, whatever it is or isn’t you need to figure what you wanna do. Maybe you should move to Ohio, be closer to—

  “I wanna die,” he said.

  I looked at the seagulls. Growing up my father called them bay pigeons.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you keep saying that.” And then I didn’t say anything, and then he didn’t say anything, and we finished our beers watching the clouds change colors before settling the bill.

  * * *

  We checked the gas, the time, the sky. None looked good but home looked worse so we went, bouncing our way across the suddenly not so Great South Bay toward Fire Island, one too many or one too few, the two us now tolerating each other for no reason except history. I snuck glances at him, marveling at the mysterious thing that was keeping him going, and it eluded me as much or more than it eluded him, same as it did with my mother at the end. She was a nurse her whole life and knew the second she got the diagnosis she was done for, then did everything in her power to speed up the process. She quit eating, refused salt and potassium, whatever she could to help her heart stop. But it didn’t, it wouldn’t, and she outlived and out-suffered the doctor’s predictions again and again, by months and weeks, until in a private moment between us she asked me to bring her my father’s Ritalin. “The whole bottle,” she said. I didn’t say anything, not because I was paralyzed but because I was genuinely considering it. I needed a minute, plus I was drinking and eating a lot of pain pills back then so I was extra slow, and after a quiet while she let me off the hook. “It’s OK,” she said, and squeezed my hand. Her comforting me. “I don’t want you to have to live with it.”