by Ty Roth
Clearly, I was no expert mariner, but I could tell that Gordon had already tacked away from what I thought was our intended destination: North Bass Island. Sure as shit, the blip on the GPS representing the Corsair was veering left from the charted path.
“I thought we …”
“Detour.”
We were headed for the southernmost of the Bass Islands, the infamous—in these parts anyway—South Bass Island, and the harbor town of Put-in-Bay, originally Pudden Bay but morphed into its current form through phonetic sloppiness. In sixth-grade Ohio history, we had been taught the “significant” role South Bass had played during the War of 1812. It was off the northwest coast of South Bass that Colonel Oliver Hazard Perry fought and defeated a British fleet for no apparent reason, except, after a major naval upset, to provide a stage on which to pronounce heroically, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.…”
I had never visited the island, but the stories of the bacchanalian revelry that takes place there during the boating season are legendary throughout the lower Great Lakes area. (There are only two seasons on the islands: boating season and preparing for boating season.) South Bass is New Orleans at Mardi Gras; spring break on South Padre; Las Vegas; Sodom and Gomorrah; Caligula’s Rome; the sultry Greek Islands; and Dodge City in amalgam, microcosmically offered in two stacked E-shaped docks and the three-block strip of bars in downtown Put-in-Bay.
For Gordon, the happiest place on earth … or so I supposed.
Me? I was scared shitless.
As I stood on the dock waiting for Gordon to stow away the Corsair, he reached into the captain’s bin again; this time, he pulled out his notorious human skull drinking cup, which I’d heard about but had never seen, and a handful of purple, gold, and green strands of cheap plastic beads, which he threw to me.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“They don’t flash ’em for free, junior” was his cryptic answer.
I soon discovered the beads’ function as we walked the docks, pushing our way through the filled-to-capacity public marina. Powerboats ranging from fourteen to fifty-plus feet (many of which bore the Byron Boatyard logo) were jammed inside the steel docks. They rafted off one another three and four deep as we neared land. Each boat was a floating frat house/strip club. The men outnumbered the ladies by at least three to one, but the women seemed to be enjoying the ratio and encouraging the attention. During our trek from where we tied off to the dockmaster’s small wooden booth/office on shore, I saw my first real topless woman—that is, the woman was real, not the boobs. I’d learned to discern the difference by the time I’d reached shore and depleted my supply of beads.
Gordon never slowed down or turned his head to look, even when a “girl gone wild” craving his attention called out to him, “Hey, Cutie. I’ll show you for free,” or “Take a look, sugar,” or invited him to “party.” He couldn’t have been less interested.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, confused.
“They disgust me. I hate this place.”
But we were in his element. Weren’t we?
“These people have no class, Keats. No style. They’re barbarians. The women are sluts. They pay ten grand on a credit card for a boob job; then, to get their money’s worth, they flash them in the face of any pecker head who’ll trade them a set of fucking fifty-cent beads. It’s pathetic.” Gordon looked over my shoulder at the flotilla behind me.
“And these guys, what assholes.” He paused to absorb the beer-bellied baseball-capped board-shorted scene. “These losers’ idea of seduction is slipping one of these already half-drunk whores a roofie, waiting for her to start feeling woozy, then offering, all gentlemanlike, to walk her back to her boat or her hotel or wherever, where she passes out and the ball-less piece of shit generates enough self-confidence to pull out his pencil dick and fuck the corpse. It’s sick. There’s no talent here.”
I think that was what really bothered Gordon. It wasn’t the lack of morality but the lack of artistry. But by the time Gordon had finished his diatribe, I wanted to rush back to the docks and collect all the beads I had given away and throw a towel around each one of the bikini-topped women.
He must have read the guilt on my face, for he said, “Not you, Keats. I don’t mean you. You need your cherry popped.”
I wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but I figured it had something to do with my obvious lack of experience with women. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what he had in store for me.
After paying the dockage fee, Gordon led me through a downtown park that by day served as a picnic and children’s play area but by night became a sort of demilitarized zone/piss stop/make-out area/detox center between the bars and the docks.
“Gordon,” I called, incapable of matching his pace. “Where we going?” He ignored my question. “What are we doing here?” No answer. “What does this have to do with Shelly?” He stopped. His patience with my ignorance had reached its limit.
“Have you ever been to North Bass, Keats?”
“No.”
“I have. Lots of times. The majority of it is a state park. The only marina is state run. What do you suppose the ranger at that marina is going to think when two kids carrying an urn and still dressed in their funeral clothes come cruising in around midnight looking for a dock? Don’t you think it might raise a few suspicions? Don’t you think he might make a few phone calls? By now they’ve got to be looking for us. Shelly’s old man has to be searching for our asses. If there’s one place that we can lose ourselves for a couple hours, this is it. People here are anonymous; the things they do here … they don’t want to attach their names to. So they don’t ask or answer many questions, but for the right price, they will tell any lie you pay them to tell. I slipped that dockmaster a hundred bucks to register us under a false name and boat and to play dumb should anybody come asking.”
My hangdog expression showed that I’d had my nose sufficiently rubbed in my stupidity.
Gordon’s tone mellowed. “We’ll do what we came to do,” he said. “We’ll keep our promise to Shelly and spread her ashes on North Bass, but we’ve got to be smart. We’ll disappear here for a while, sleep a little. Just before dawn, we’ll cruise over to North Bass, slip into the marina, and finish this. All right?”
I nodded in agreement.
It was just approaching six hours since we’d ash-napped Shelly, but it seemed like a lifetime ago.
“Wait here,” Gordon said.
We had just entered a railroad-tie-enclosed pit that contained a pair of high swing sets; the ground was layered with bits of recycled rubber still warm from the day’s heat. (One ten-year study reported nearly 150 deaths in the United States due to unsafe playground equipment, strangulation and swing impact being the most common causes.)
“Where you going?” I asked, more nervous about being abandoned than sincerely curious about Gordon’s destination.
“Just wait here. I won’t be long.” He handed me his skull cup.
The swing had one of those rubber strap seats that fold up around your ass and hips. The oaks and maples in the park blocked much of the moonlight, so as far as I could tell the chains holding that seat climbed past them and attached to stars. Waiting, I didn’t swing so much as I swayed, looping in small ovals in the air. Occasionally, a group of revelers stumbled past me in either direction.
The park itself seemed beastlike and sentient, alive with all sorts of cathartic grunts and groans. I tried not to imagine the spewing forth of bodily fluids that were taking place all around me, or their sources of origin, but I instinctively lifted my feet onto the swing and tried to think of something else.
The skull cup.
I had always assumed that Gordon’s infamous skull cup was a novelty item that he had purchased cheaply at some souvenir shop, but feeling the cool hardness of its uneven surface and observing its more-yellow-than-white coloring, I knew it was authentic, a real dead man’s skull. I almost dropped it at the thought, but my cur
iosity won out. I began to study it as best as I could in the limited light. Though smaller than I would have thought, it clearly was an adult’s. In order to drink from the cup, the skull had to be turned upside down and the eye and nose sockets used for gripping, like the holes in a bowling ball. Gordon had hollowed out as much of the bone as had been needed to mold a plastic container inside the cavity, so that the top of the skull served as the bottom of the cup. As I pantomimed the act of lifting and tilting the skull to drink, it was eerie to watch the fleshless face come noseless to nose with me.
“Is that him?” A female’s voice from the surrounding blackness startled me, ending my stare-down with the near future. But the pronunciation wasn’t right, more like “Es dat heem?”
“That’s him.” The second bodiless voice was Gordon’s; he was speaking in a condescending tone, almost as if he were talking to a child.
“He’s cute,” she said.
“I told you this would be easy,” Gordon said as he emerged from the darkness and the trees. His arm was around the shoulders of a tall dirty-blonde. She wore black high heels that sank an inch deep into the soft turf with each step, a denim miniskirt, and a pink sleeveless tank top whose spaghetti straps had fallen to mid-bicep level, leaving her black bra straps exposed. It may have been the moonglow, but her skin seemed pale, almost pasty, as if it were midwinter rather than the start of summer. If not for Gordon’s assistance, she would have fallen flat on her face.
It was pure Gordon; he couldn’t have been gone fifteen minutes, and he had already picked up a girl.
“Keats, meet Nadia.”
“Hi, Keats,” Nadia said with a windshield wiper wave of her hand, which sent her listing heavily to starboard, only to be righted by Gordon’s quick grasp.
“Nadia here is looking to party,” Gordon explained. “She has a place above one of the bars and would like it if you would spend some time with her.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Aren’t you coming too?”
“No. I need to … um … check on the boat. You two go.”
That said, Gordon threw her in my direction. She stumbled toward me. I caught her beneath her armpits, but she still fell so that her nose was literally buried in my crotch. Not strong enough to lift her myself—she was at least a foot taller and probably twenty pounds heavier than I—I laid her down as gently as possible on the rubber-chip mattress. She didn’t move.
I marched over to Gordon. “What the fuck, Gordon? Do you really expect me to just hang out with her while you go down to the boat?”
A smirk spread over Gordon’s moonlit face. “I don’t expect you to ‘hang out with her’ at all. It’s time you become a man, Keats. Like I said, you need to pop that cherry of yours.”
“Are you insane? I’m not sleeping with some random girl!”
“I don’t want you to ‘sleep’ with her either.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I don’t even know her!”
“Sure you do. Her name is Nadia and she’s willing to fuck you. What more do you need to know?”
“Didn’t you just say, not a half hour ago, that you hate ‘loose women’?”
“She’s not a loose woman, Keats. She’s a hooker. There’s a difference. Look, this island is full of foreign workers who come here on six-month visas. They get paid minimum wage, which is probably ten times what they’d be paid for similar work at home, if they could find it. Most of them hold down at least two jobs and work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Some of the girls, like Nadia here, supplement their income even further with some selective hooking on the side. Hell, you’d be doing her a favor; you’d probably be feeding her family back home or helping her to finance a college education. Just consider it a co-sympathy fuck.”
“Why the hell do you care anyway?”
“Relax, dude. I don’t. I just thought you could use a good lay. You know, loosen up a bit. But whatever.”
Together, we studied Nadia, lying on the rubber with her skirt hiked up, exposing a tiny pink thong and a round Eastern Bloc ass. “Are you sure?” Gordon asked after a moment.
“I’m sure.”
“At least help me get her up,” he said.
We propped her between us and more-dragged-than-walked her to a nearby park bench, where Gordon gently placed her lying down, faceup. He removed a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and placed it inside her bra.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“We can’t just leave her,” I argued.
“Sure we can,” he said, and headed toward the docks.
A cacophonic admixture of music from the bars and the stereos on the boats surrounding us made it impossible to sleep, so Gordon and I talked to pass the time until the island and its visitors had spent themselves and we could grab a few hours of rest. Gordon lay next to Shelly on the deck of the Corsair, which rocked gently with the passing waves and the occasional wake made by late-exiting boaters. I sat cross-kneed on the steady dock.
“What’s up with the skull?” I asked at last.
“My sister, Shelly, and I dug that up on Johnson’s Island when we were kids.”
“From the prisoner-of-war cemetery?” I asked.
“No. But not far from it. We were digging a trench to recreate the Battle of Antietam, and there it was. A complete skeleton. Shelly insisted it was an Ottawa Indian warrior, but I didn’t think so. Anyway, I wrapped the skull in my T-shirt and took it home with me. Actually, I forgot I had it after a while. Found it in a box when I was packing for prep school. That’s when I read Hamlet in freshman English class. You know, Yorick? The grave digger scene? It reminded me of this skull.” He held it up for me to see.
“Why a cup?”
“When I came home to Ogontz after that year with the Brothers, I dug it out. For a while, it just sat on a shelf in my room. But then I thought it could be put to a better and more practical use as a memento mori, a reminder of death like the ones medieval monks kept around. You know, carpe diem, hakuna matata, the old gladiator’s code: ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’ That sort of thing.”
I tried absorbing his philosophical musings, but my fingertips were busy impulsively tracing my cheekbones and jawline as an image of my own fleshless face flashed in my mind. “Gordon?”
“Yeah, Keats.”
“I should have done it with Nadia, huh?”
“Yes, Keats, you should have.”
After a few moments of contemplating what could have been, I heard Gordon’s light snore rising from the Corsair.
There was no way I would have been able to sleep on that dock, and I wasn’t ready to be left alone with my thoughts. So I said, “Gordon?”
“What? I was almost asleep.”
“Let’s play the disc.”
“What disc?”
“Shelly’s. The R.E.M. mix. I can’t sleep.”
“I can.” He was testy but propped himself up on his elbows and went along with it. “The boom box is up front, but don’t play it for too long; I want to save the batteries for later.”
I lowered myself into the boat, stepped over Gordon and Shelly, removed the disc from my suit coat pocket, retrieved the boom box, and then climbed back onto the dock and repositioned myself with the player on my lap.
“Gordon?” I said again.
“What now?” He was on the verge of losing his temper.
“Which song did Shelly have for you?”
“ ‘Nightswimming.’ It’s number six. I ought to know; she played it enough,” he said, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed to the heavens. “But it’s not just mine. It’s Augusta’s and Shelly’s too. She called it ‘our song.’ ”
I put in the disc and forwarded to number six, but I immediately recognized the opening notes to “Losing My Religion.” Rather than bothering Gordon again, I pressed the forward button, and the very first word from Michael Stipe’s mouth was “Nightswimming.” When he reached the second verse in a voice of raspy nostalgia over a piano-driven arr
angement, the appropriateness of Shelly’s song choice for their less-than-holy trinity came clear: “Nightswimming deserves a quiet night. / I’m not sure all these people understand.” It was perfect. Twelve words captured both the beauty and the frustration of the threesome they’d formed.
I pressed pause, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine Shelly’s face, but it’s weird how soon you forget a dead person’s face. I think it’s because people wear so many of them that when you try to recall just one, you get a blurred blending that renders that one version, which you’re trying so desperately to see, unrecognizable. It’s like that with my parents.
“I hate that song,” Gordon said before rolling onto his side and turning his back to me.
I ejected the disc and made sure the power was off on the boom box. When I placed the disc back in its case, I realized that another, unmarked disc was already in the other’s place. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d removed the R.E.M. disc.
“Gordon?”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Keats! If you don’t leave me alone and let me get some sleep, I swear I’m going to throw you in.”
“What’s this?” I asked, ignoring Gordon’s rage and holding up the case with the mystery disc inside.
“How the fuck should I know? You had the disc. She must have put two discs in one case by mistake. What’s the big deal?”
I realized that not only had I not bothered to listen to the disc since she’d given it to me, I’d never even opened the case. “It’s no big deal; it’s just not like Shelly. I mean, she could be careless about a lot of things, but not about her favorite CDs.”
I tried to make out any markings on it in the moonlight but couldn’t. “Do you have a flashlight?” I asked Gordon.
“In the bin,” he said, before sitting and finally giving up on trying to get any sleep before morning.
I jumped down into the boat and found the flashlight. Gordon met me at the captain’s console, where I shined the beam onto the disc.
“That’s not a CD,” Gordon said. “It’s a DVD. There’s a movie or something on there that she must’ve wanted us to see.”