by Nick Arvin
The fog filled with light and paled. Somewhere before me the sun was rising and burning. Suddenly a phantom figure appeared, striding rapidly down the beach. It moved so fast, I didn’t have time to call out a warning before it stopped and brought both hands up to grope at the fishing line it had just walked into.
“I’m sorry!” I called.
“No, no, I’m sorry!” came the reply, a male voice. In a moment he disentangled himself and came up the sand to meet me. The smile was the first feature to appear out of the fog, and before I saw the rest of him I knew him—the smiling man from the restaurant.
We introduced ourselves; his name was Beetle Johnson. He recognized me, too, he said smiling; he had seen me around the hotel. I mean, he said this while smiling, through his teeth, the way a ventriloquist does. We marveled together at the density of the fog. He asked if I’d caught anything. I said, only him. He laughed. He told me he had come out to look for seashells, but he wouldn’t find any today unless he tripped over them. Then, having exhausted the easy conversation, we both turned to look at the fog-shrouded ocean. He was still smiling. I wondered at the peculiarity of catching this man on my line. His smile had entered into my life as no mere passing image, but as a repeating reminder.
Then I noticed something on the water. The fog had continued to thin subtly, and I could see a heavy dark shape, low, coming in amid the waves. Then I saw another, and then a third—three of these things—like some antediluvian species coming from the mists to reclaim a place on earth. I still gripped my fishing pole, which trembled and jerked with the movements of the waves: I held on to that pole with desperate fervor. The low shapes glided silently in the water, one to the left of my fishing line and two to the right. Then they collided with the sand in a loud, violent grinding, and through the fog I heard yet more of them hitting up and down the beach.
Beetle turned. “Jack, do you see that?” he asked.
I began to reel in my fishing line.
Then the beasts opened their mouths and men ran out. Through the fog we could see that these were big men, with rifles and backpacks and helmets that made their shadowy heads look deformed. They splashed through the water and threw themselves onto the sand. Pointing their guns ahead of them, they scanned the fog and crawled forward.
“What do you think this means?” I asked Beetle.
“Means?” He giggled.
One of the marines stood and shouted orders to the others. Then, at a signal, they all rose up. Beetle giggled again. We could see a couple dozen of them, strung out along the beach. They ran ahead a few paces, dropped to one knee and aimed, then jumped up to run again. They pounded past us, one of them so close I could have put a foot out and tripped him. They scrambled up the short cliff of sand behind the beach and were gone.
A handful of marines remained on the beach. They drew little shovels from their packs and started to dig.
“Do you think that they’re American?” Beetle whispered.
“Good Lord, I hope so. You heard the one issuing orders, he sounded American. What else could they be?”
“I don’t know,” he said through his smile. “The French.”
“French?”
He laughed, and I laughed. We laughed like relieved idiots on a foggy beach while the marines climbed into their foxholes, still scanning with their weapons. Here were symbols upon symbols. Boats that emerged out of the fog as mysteriously as alien spacecraft, opening and vomiting forth their young. Dream figures that crashed through the water, swarmed around us, and passed onward. No one shouted to clear the way. The marines looked through me as if I were part of the fog.
A tap on my shoulder startled me. Here was the Cheshire cat grin again, like a toothy gap in the fabric of the universe. The grin said, “Let’s go, Jack. Let’s get the hell out of here.” I gathered my things, and with the surf thundering portentously on our left we walked back to the hotel together.
A short time later Beetle and I brought our wives down to see the marines and their amphibious landers. The sun had burned away most of the fog, and we could now see a good distance across the water. Still feeling deeply unsettled, I walked somewhat ahead of the others, looking for marines with automatic rifles and large steel boats. But Beetle called me back.
“This is it,” he said, pointing to a row of holes in the sand. The marines were gone. They had left behind nothing but a mess of heavy boot-prints and their foxholes, which now looked small, like they might have been dug by ambitious children. Lita said, “This is it?” as if she thought Beetle and I had run up and down here wearing boots, scooping out holes with our hands.
As we walked back, Beetle asked me what I did for a living. I told him, without even a smirk, that I was an insurance salesman.
Beetle was a salesman, too. He sold advertising merchandise. If someone wanted matchbooks or magnets or retractable pens printed with the name of their business, their mascot or slogan, Beetle was the man to set it up. He told me this smiling as though he were describing the greatest job in the world.
Beetle and his wife were scheduled to leave that afternoon. When we met them on the hotel patio for lunch, Beetle’s wife quickly excused herself, saying she needed to pack. Across Caesar salads and iced tea, Beetle and I traded stories about our jobs. Lita worked intently with a pen on the back of her menu. When Beetle asked what she was drawing, she clutched the menu for a moment as if she were going to hide it. But then she held the page toward Beetle.
“Did they look like this?” She giggled.
My face went hot. In the center of the page, large and unmistakable, she had drawn a helmeted marine charging up a beach, holding a rifle in massive, rocklike fists, with little ringlets of fog at his knees. I was about to say something, but Beetle burst out with a great, unqualified belly laugh that shook the table and had all of us grabbing our glasses to prevent them from spilling. Beetle laughed harder, and slapped his knee. Of course soon Lita and I were laughing with him. Lita gave him the drawing. “A memento,” she said, “of the invasion.”
After we paid the bill, Beetle shook my hand and asked whether I had a business card. I found one in my wallet, and he stood a moment grinning at it. Then he gave me a mechanical pencil. On the barrel was printed,
Beetle Johnson
Southeast Regional Sales Manager
Advertising Stuff America, Inc.
“Your Name Here!”
and a phone number. I said good-bye and Beetle said, “Semper Fi.”
After the Johnsons’ departure, I resolved to say nothing; we were on vacation and I hoped for peace. But we had hardly gotten back to our room before Lita began it. Turning on me, she said, “Maybe it didn’t mean anything.”
“Marines!” I cried, throwing my hands up, instantly exasperated. “Armed combatants storming ashore all around us! You should have seen it, Lita.”
“They went astray in the fog. You happened to be there. That’s all. Why can’t that be all?”
“Because we happened to be there. Don’t you see? We happened to be there. This thing happened to us. It was extraordinary.”
We stared at each other a second. I wanted very much for her to understand, but I could explain no better. “Whatever,” she said. She turned on the TV.
I gathered my swim trunks and a towel and sunscreen, thinking that I could sit in the sun on the beach and I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone if I didn’t want to. Lita looked over. “Where are you going?”
“The beach.”
“What about the cruise?”
I had forgotten about the cruise. We were scheduled for a half-day sunset trip. Remembering it now, a sour feeling came into my gut. I said, “I don’t think we should go.”
Lita lay back on the bed as if suddenly exhausted. She gazed at the ceiling. Her lips were tight and in her neck the tendons rose under the skin. “Why not?” she said. “Tell me why not.”
“If we go out on that boat, I guarantee, we will disappear over the horizon and never be heard from again.�
��
“Because of the marines.”
“I think so. Yes. I feel it, Lita.”
She closed her eyes. Perhaps a minute passed, then she said, softly, “All right.”
“We’ll skip the cruise.”
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s skip the cruise.”
I was surprised—I knew she had been looking forward to the cruise. I said, “Thank you, dear.”
She just lay there, very still, as if asleep. But I could see her eyes moving under the lids, casting about rapidly.
We sat on the beach a while that afternoon, and later we watched TV in the room. A local television station carried a short news item on a marine unit participating in war games that had gotten lost in the fog. Lita and I made slow, tired love that night, as if obliged because we were on vacation, and when we were done she rolled off to sleep without a word. I tossed for hours before I slept.
When I woke, I was alone in the bed. A note in Lita’s handwriting said, “Gone for a swim. Back soon.” Dressed only in a robe, I ran to the beach. The fog of the day before had blown away completely, the rising sun cast the beach in strong light, and not a soul moved on it or in the water. I called for her and the gulls replied.
Even before I had walked far up and down the beach, before I had questioned everyone in the vicinity, before the police had taken over, before the exhausting search of the hotel and the surrounding landscape, before the divers had gone down, before the water had been dredged—I understood she would not be back. Like the marines, she had disappeared, and I would not find her again. I stood on that beach and I bitterly cursed myself and my pathetic, mortal idiocy, for not deciphering that moment when I had stood surrounded by the footprints of a missing invasion.
In the following months I did not see a coin dropped, did not pass a house with darkened windows, did not watch the fading of a sunset, did not experience any of the minutia of life without wondering if it might be a sign—of what happened to Lita, where she had gone, whether she was alive or dead. Sometimes the clear waters of a lake held exactly the color of her eyes, and I was happy for a moment. But later a hunched taxi driver laughed bitterly and rolled his shoulders the way she used to, and my hope shriveled. One day I was looking through her old drawings, and near at hand happened to be some road maps. Soon I found a nearly perfect match between her drawing of a child’s puppy-laden wagon and a network of roads through Iowa, Indiana, and Missouri. I spent most of a month following the route before I finally gave up.
Exactly one year after the marines stormed the beach and Lita disappeared, a large overnight package arrived. I thought it must have been expensive to send, and I wondered if it might have been delivered to the wrong address. I pushed it inside and looked at the sender’s name: Beetle Johnson. I had almost forgotten him, but now my heart twisted and wrung the memory out.
Inside the package, wrapped in tissue paper, were eight tall glasses, eight coffee mugs, and eight shot glasses. Emblazoned on every one was Beetle’s name, my name, the words, “Commemorating the First Anniversary of the Invasion of the Beaches at Fort Pierce, Florida,” and Lita’s drawing of a marine charging out of surf and fog. My first thought was to smash it all to pieces. But I remembered that Beetle had left before Lita disappeared: he thought he was sending me a few trinkets in innocent fun. Recalling his unearthly smile, I left the box on the floor.
The next day the phone rang, and a voice said without introduction, “What do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Pretty funny, huh? ‘Commemorating the Invasion’? I thought you’d like that.”
Now I recognized him. Even on the phone he seemed to exude his smile like an electronic grin in the buzz of the phone lines.
I felt immediately I should tell him of the sickness I experienced at seeing Lita’s disappearance memorialized on coffee mugs and shot glasses, but the emotions were difficult to name, and finally I simply told Beetle, yes, they were pretty funny.
Beetle laughed and zapped smiles at me. He asked, “How is your wife?”
“My wife?”
“Yeah! You know, that woman you find sleeping beside you in bed every morning.”
“Lita is—well, you know. What I mean.”
“Sure I do, Jack! I remember when my wife and I were your age. The world was like an oyster full of pearls. Remind me, how long have you two been married?”
“Our fourth anniversary, that was just a couple of months back.”
“Wonderful! If you can make it four years you can make the long haul. There are days though—some days in a marriage are like that morning on the beach. Like, whoa! what’s this, where’s this coming from? You’ve probably seen some of that, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, buddy, I’m here to say it gets better.” He chuckled, then fell silent, and I listened to the buzzing grin. He said, “I still think about that day. The waves, the fog. Boats, shadows, soldiers jumping out. Some days, I can’t believe we saw it.”
“It was a strange thing.”
“I’ll admit, it scared the hell out of me. I’m glad you were there.”
I was moved by this frank emotion. “Me too, Beetle,” I said, honestly. “I’m glad we were there together.”
I let the box of commemorative drink-ware sit on the floor for several days. Then I slid it into the kitchen, where it sat a while longer. Eventually I grew tired of bumping into it every time I opened the refrigerator, and I arrayed the mugs and glasses in a back corner of the cupboard. They cowered there until one day when all my regular glasses were dirty. After a second’s hesitation, I drank a commemorative glass of orange juice.
The next year Beetle sent more stuff—second anniversary T-shirts, bumper stickers, and plastic shoehorns. He called and asked, “When are you two going to produce some rugrats to keep around the house?”
“Oh, well,” I said. A silence ensued and extended until I seemed to hear Beetle’s smile dimming. Suddenly I blurted, “We already have one.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, little Jenny arrived nearly two months back. Sweetest baby girl ever.”
“I don’t doubt it! That’s wonderful! It’s amazing what can happen in just a year, a new little person can be made and named. Shoot. If I have one regret it’s that we never had kids.”
“It’s something else being a father. But it can be a pain in the ass too.”
“Yes sir, my one regret would be no little Beetles or Beetlettes to feed and toss around and teach a thing or two. I’m glad for you, I really am.”
“Thanks, Beetle.” Elation washed back and forth inside me, as though I were being congratulated for something that I had actually done.
On the third anniversary came ties, lapel pins, stationery, calendars, and retractable pens; on the fourth anniversary: matchbooks, miniflashlights, bottle openers, and cheap digital watches. He called every year. I told him about little Jenny growing teeth and hair, going ga-ga and goo-goo, and getting big fast. When I felt I had been talking too long, I would ask, “How are things for you, Beetle? How’s business?”
“Business is booming!” This is what he said every time, and he said it enthusiastically, but some subtle lonely note in his voice caused me to connect the word boom with the desolate tumbleweed ghost towns that follow boomtowns. He would say, “The market for ‘individualized trinkets,’ as I call them, is taking off. It makes all the sense in the world, if you think about it. Everyone has all kinds of stuff lying around the house. Imagine the advertising power invoked when your brand is proudly displayed on every one of those small but necessary household items. That’s why I encourage my larger customers to try to achieve ‘full home saturation.’ That is, ideally, the advertiser has an item in every room in the prospective customer’s house—a comb in the bathroom, a cup in the kitchen, a clock in the living room, a shoehorn in the bedroom, and, in the study, a mouse pad beside the computer—you see?”
I did see. For the fifth anniversary he sent baseball caps, penknives, F
risbees, pencils, and erasers. On the sixth anniversary came magnets, outdoor thermometers, a clock, more calendars, lighters, and mouse pads.
I stunned myself when we spoke that year, and I told him that little Jenny had fallen into a frozen lake and died. I experienced a sudden, horrible stabbing of loss and yearning, as though my little girl really had died. “It’s hard,” I told him. “An agony.” I looked at the walls of my empty house. “We’ve decided to try for another one, another little girl or boy.”
“I’m sorry, so sorry about your loss,” Beetle said. “But I think you have the right spirit. Give your love a new object.”
Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen years passed in this way. In real life I took out ads in the personals but hung up if anyone actually called. I spent my nights alone with the ticking of a commemorative clock. Still, some mornings I forgot and felt sleepily across the bed, expecting to find Lita beside me, and every time the discovery of her absence opened a fresh, exquisite pain. But all that faded in my conversations with Beetle. When I was speaking to Beetle, Lita had never left. She gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, and I told Beetle about the children and trips to the dentist where they screamed and clung to the doorways and spilled dental implements everywhere. I told him about visits to the in-laws’, the dreadful food, the pieces of the crystal the twins broke, and the uncles who shook the kids upside down by the ankles until they puked. There had been confrontations with the neighbor’s three-legged pit bull and harrowing battles with a penknife-wielding kindergarten bully. I spoke about the nights of romantic relief that Lita and I enjoyed when the children were staying at Grandma’s house. Beetle contributed chuckles of appreciation and bits of generic advice, things like: “You’ve got to give the kids room to breathe, to find their own space. But only a little, remember, only a little,” or, “Teach those children to fish! Teach them to fish!”