by Cole Alpaugh
And they did.
The remaining loyalists—some had grabbed their belongings and fled into the brightly lit Atlantic City night—abided Reverend Billy Wayne’s order and turned onto Ventnor Avenue, slowly rolling northeast up the narrow strip to Atlantic Avenue. They followed the giant green signs toward the Expressway, which took them west, away from the glow of the city. They exited onto a north traveling road, and Billy Wayne watched for signs toward West Tuckerton, where he knew they’d find the road to take them to their new home.
Great Bay Boulevard was a pavement made of shells and polished stones that led travelers almost due south, over dozens of canals and tiny islands, across the marshes and protected wetlands. The road spliced a nearly prehistoric, yet bland, ecosystem of bubbling mud and rotting flora toward a piece of New Jersey that few people ever saw, despite the well-maintained and smooth access.
The black eastern sky over the ocean had broken to purple, as the caravan made a final left turn off the boulevard. The drivers of the largest trucks tested their faith, slowly creeping up and over the rickety bridge onto Fish Head Island.
“Ain’t gonna make it,” the driver of Billy Wayne’s truck said, resigned and matter-of-factly, and just a few hundred yards away, the exact same words might have been spoken with a drunken slur by Warden Clayton Flint.
* * *
Warden Flint was perfectly happy sitting on the back step of the shack that doubled as an official department office and his home, smoking cigarettes and taking pulls off a bottle of cheap Russian vodka. What brought him joy was the absolute silence he’d caused to go along with the lack of a single flying or otherwise biting bug, despite being smack dab in the middle of what would normally be called bug central.
Flint was in charge of protecting the fish and game inhabiting a plot of roughly twelve square miles of percolating land and water. He was also responsible for a weekly hump out to the county seat to fill up the hundred gallon drum with either temephos or malathion pesticides. His truck was equipped with a mist blower, whose powerful blast ejected insecticide into the airstream, killing either the larvae or adult pests. Some three decades back Flint had begun the job with great resolve and ambition, making absolutely certain to treat every square foot of his territory. He even went so far as to check the wind gauges before setting out, ensuring the drift would come from the right direction and taking particular care to mist the small eddies and ponds after rains.
As the years wore on, the circle of treatment grew smaller and smaller, until a few months ago, when he stopped bothering to drive the truck anywhere after returning with the poisons. He still had to drive out to headquarters, fill the tank, and then sign and file the required paperwork in order to show he was doing his job. But there was nobody to check how the poison was disbursed, nobody to care.
Back at his post on the marshes off Great Bay Boulevard, he simply cranked the mist blower motor, opened the valve, and went inside the shack to relax in the air-conditioning. He would cozy up with a magazine featuring huge boobs and off-color party jokes, while a deadly fog engulfed the shack and surrounding wetland.
What difference would it make? Days after you stopped spraying, the mosquitoes, green heads, horse flies, no-see-ums, and black flies came back in full force. And the only people he was protecting were the day crabbers who came down from nearby cities with chicken legs on strings and long handled nets. These people were unbelievable pigs to the very last one. Every carload was good for a dozen cans or bottles tossed into the canal, left bobbing next to the floating potato chip bags and sandwich wrappers. The kids who came down at night kept their engines running, air conditioners and music blaring. They noticed the bugs about as much as they did Flint’s occasional episodes of exhibitionism, which he only engaged in when drunk and regretted when sober.
“People are pigs,” Flint said into the night, taking another swig of Russian vodka, referring to the litterers, and a little to himself. He let the bugs feast away on the city slickers, and it served them fucking right.
When it came to bugs, Flint could sit on the back step of this shack naked as a jaybird at any hour of the day or night, if the urge so took him. With a full hundred gallons of insecticide injected into the ecosystem of the immediate area on a weekly basis, not a cricket chirped or a fly buzzed. Any frogs—had they been able to tolerate all the poison—would have long since packed up and moved on for lack of food, as had the fish in the canal and any terns or ducks in the tall grasses. Everything with a heartbeat was dead or driven off, except for the game warden.
“Slow actin’.” Flint held the bottle of what he knew was his own poison out in front of him, tilting it toward the yellow light filtering through the nearest window.
Warden Flint had come to love his silence, which was now being broken by a line of slow moving trucks that had rolled past the driveway to the fish and game shack. The trucks made a wide left turn toward Fish Head Island’s bridge. Flint watched as one by one the truck headlights tilted up into the black sky, each vehicle crawling across the old wooden bridge that must be shaking and swaying from the enormous load.
“Goin’ in the drink.” Flint took a long swig off the vodka bottle, as each vehicle tested the dilapidated structure. Flint shook his head each time one made it across, counting one after the other, and then losing track of what and why he was counting. Miraculously, the bridge survived, and nothing but angry red taillights stared back in the distance, disappearing somewhere behind the tall grasses of the outermost island of Flint’s jurisdiction.
Flint leaned back against the door of the shack, meaning to close his eyes just for a second, maybe figure out a plan of action for doing some investigating regarding these new developments out on Fish Head. Lots of things to be done, Flint thought, yawning and rubbing his stubbly face. He tilted the bottle in his right hand to see how much was left and then brought it toward his face, sloshing the rest down in one final, wet gulp.
Flint entered that satisfying spinning time, when all the pains and worries had left his reach, yet he sensed he was still alive. He imagined this was how a man felt when his life turned out good, with a stash of money in the bank, a real house, and maybe a decent woman. It wasn’t so much the alcohol that he’d become addicted to, but the chance to catch a glimpse of this good life, if only for a minute or two before passing out. And what did it cost him? Less than four bucks a bottle, and the occasional hangover to kick him in the balls the next day.
But tonight, his moment or two in the good life was different. He was a kid again, back at the arcades he used to haunt with his friends in Seaside Heights, burning through quarters, sharing smokes, and passing around French fry filled paper cups drowned in catsup. It was the music, Flint decided. His drunken head lolled to one side against the back door, ear turned like a satellite dish to collect the sounds drifting on the gentle sea breeze. A kind of music a kid never even thought of as music. It didn’t play on the radio or at birthday parties. You didn’t hear it in grocery stores, or coming from behind the band room door at school. It was music that meant one place and only one place to Clayton Flint. Music that smelled of cotton candy and caramel apples, and the baby wipes moms used to scrub their kid’s hands. It smelled of pepperoni pizza, sour garbage cans, and cocoa butter glistening on the untouchable skin of the older girls in stiff new bikinis.
The music was a link to the past. The rising and falling whistles of the circus calliope became a lullaby for Warden Flint in the otherwise silent night.
Chapter 12
Fish and Game Warden Clayton Flint was used to treating hangovers. It was a matter of picking one’s self up off of the floor and trying to avoid too many obstacles en route to a fresh, unopened bottle of inexpensive Russian vodka. God help you if they ever stop manufacturing cheap Russian vodka, he thought, shielding his eyes from the brutal morning sun and groping for the shack’s rusty doorknob.
Flint’s back was a knot of razor blades and broken glass, which shot sparks of bright white
pain up his shoulders and neck, onward to his thudding brain. He stepped blindly into the sparsely furnished, one-room building and decided his first task would be to pull the shades. His second would be finding the short, dorm-sized refrigerator. He yanked the door open so hard it nearly toppled forward. The clanking glass jabbed at his skull, and he flicked his tongue across dry lips, tasting a hint of the vomit that must have interrupted his sleep at some point.
Flint fished out the first tall, skinny bottle his hand came across and cracked open the blue screw-top. He took three long gulping pulls and then paused with his drinking arm half-cocked, waiting for the heat to find its mark. Flint’s stomach clenched at the first hit of booze, but the alcohol flooded into his bloodstream within a minute or two, and the world got a little less shaky. After another couple of short swigs, Flint’s crippling headache started to release its grip, the way he imagined an octopus would release an inedible bowling ball.
He opened the back door, stepped out onto the small deck, unzipped his trousers and fumbled with his penis. He waited for his cranky prostate to allow him to empty his full bladder, tears building up in his eyes as he willed the urine to come. And just as it did come, with all the relief God could grant a tortured man, his blurred vision registered all the trucks parked on Fish Head Island.
“Last night,” Flint said out loud, foggily recalling the line of trucks off in the night. Something about circus music, too. The stream of pee dwindled down to single, strained drops, and Flint shook three times and adjusted the bottom half of his uniform.
“Duty calls.” Flint was surprised not to hate the idea of having a little duty to perform around this place. Other than that odd little man he’d fished out of the canal and a couple of boys he shooed off for plugging gulls with a .22, not much duty had called in recent months.
The warden slapped his face with cold water from the little kitchenette sink, strapped on his badass forty-four magnum, and took a few extra quick hits off old Mister Ruski for good luck. He headed out the door to answer the call of duty.
Chapter 13
A lion roared, or maybe just hacked something up, someplace disturbingly close.
Warden Flint’s pickup thumped over a deep rut, apparently made by one of the flatbed trucks loaded down with a kid-size roller coaster, and slid to a stop next to where Billy Wayne Hooduk was holding court with two men and a kid.
The kid, Flint saw upon closer inspection, was actually a tiny man with a pencil mustache, standing no more than belt high. One of the other men turned out to have full, torpedo-like breasts to go along with a scraggly beard. The third person had hundreds of metal piercings that puckered, stretched, and did other unnatural looking things to every square inch of his head and face. The man with tits was far less disturbing than the one with earlobe material dangling to his shoulders.
There was actually a fourth; Flint nearly tripped over the crudely built stretcher holding a supine man who seemed glued as low to the ground as he could possibly get.
“Sorry,” Flint told the guy on the ground.
“No problem,” Flat Man answered, tilting his head for a look up at the warden. “Happens all the time.”
The fact that the circus had come to town was doing nothing to improve Flint’s hangover.
Billy Wayne, though, appeared to be in great spirits, breaking away from his odd group to greet Flint as he climbed out of his truck. The hairy-faced man or woman smiled at Flint and blew a theatrical kiss before sauntering off around the big truck.
“I suppose you’re wondering ’bout all this.” Billy Wayne beamed. Flint noticed the troupe had already set up at least four small tents and a couple of cooking fires that sent spirals of blue smoke into the skuzzy gray sky.
“They can’t be here.” Warden Flint slammed his door and leaned against the front quarter panel of his truck. “You might very well be God, but this land is protected marsh.”
“It's a beautiful place, in its own way.” Billy Wayne looked out beyond the hulking vehicles. “It’s almost like coming right down to the end of the world.”
Flint closed his eyes and rubbed both temples with his thumbs in tight, hard circles, the pain coming back in heavy waves. “It don’t matter what you think it might be the end of. There ain’t no overnight camping, and there sure as shit ain’t no circuses.”
Billy Wayne turned and slowly walked toward an opening between two of the flatbeds. Flint followed his footprints in the mud. Billy Wayne led them across the gravel drive, and they stopped at the edge of solid land to look out at the inlet toward the Atlantic. Flint wanted very much to turn back and crack open a bottle of his good medicine stashed on the passenger floor of his truck.
“Can’t do it, Billy Wayne. Just can’t do it.” Flint sensed something different in the fat little man he’d pulled out of the canal a few days earlier, the son of that crazy loon. Something had gotten hold of him, or he’d gotten hold of it. Hell, somewhere he’d gotten hold of an entire friggin’ circus.
“It’s come to me that sooner or later we all arrive at a crossroad.” Flint stood listening quietly. A few gulls did a quick flyby but found nothing interesting and rode the slight breeze south. “I came face to face with my personal crossroad not half a day ago.”
Flint said nothing, just listened to the strange howls and grunts and swears coming from the men and animals behind them. It was high tide on a full moon, and the briny water surged up to cover what was normally dry ground here on Fish Head. Flint was partial to this cycle of the tide. It filled the canals and carried away a good bit of the trash. It covered the mud flats and things didn’t smell so much like death and rot.
“It ain’t an easy thing,” Billy Wayne went on. “The entire course a man’s life takes depends on which direction he decides to turn when he reaches that crossroad. Sometimes we’re walkin’ toward a thing and sometimes we’re running away from it. I think you know what I’m talking about.”
“I know you people ain’t supposed to be down here with all this stuff.” Flint’s voice didn’t hold any real conviction.
“Of course we aren’t. Just like a man such as yourself probably wasn’t meant to spend year after year in a rundown shack, lookin’ out for seagulls and snapping turtles. But somethin’ in your life brought you to a crossroad, and this was your choice, am I right?”
Clayton Flint shrank from the question, feeling accused by the son of a woman whose life he’d wrecked pretty darn good.
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Flint said.
“Maybe you do and maybe you don’t.” Billy Wayne tried to look Flint in the eye. “But I can look you straight in the eye and see you understand that sometimes we need to take a leap of faith. To do something that seems all wrong and against the rules. But we know in our heart of hearts it’s right. That it’s something we have to do. You follow me on this?”
Like the tide, Clayton Flint’s hangover crested under the morning’s glare. Looking out over the calm water where he’d stared a million times before, he again heard the plaintive voice on his answering machine telling him about a baby he’d put in that crazy broad’s belly. He sure as hell hadn’t done a very good job with that particular crossroad. The voice on his machine had been one of the reasons he’d sold his truck with the big green plastic bug screwed to the roof. The voice was probably the only reason he sold the tanks and sprayers and told his landlord he was taking off to find greener pastures. There were a half-dozen openings in the newspaper classifieds for state jobs down by the shore. Jobs for fish and game, which he knew a little about ’cause he hunted and fished, but there were also a couple listings for insect control. And insect control without the carnal temptations was just what the doctor had ordered for Flint. Getting out from under the dreams he kept waking up from, starting all new and fresh. Clayton Flint may not have had a guilty bone in his body, but something had gotten inside him enough to let him know he was done with lonely housewives.
“You know what I’m askin’
of you?” Billy Wayne folded his arms over his round belly, rolling a small rock under the toe of his shiny old shoe.
Flint shoved his hands deep in his front pockets, still looking out over the water, hearing Allison Hooduk’s voice louder than ever.
“What I got here is a group of lost souls.” Billy Wayne nodded back over his shoulder to where his lost souls were now frying bacon in a big iron skillet and tossing a flat, deflated football someone had found in the grass.
The fish and game warden’s crusty old heart wanted more than anything to know what had become of Allison Hooduk and the baby she’d called and called about. He’d been hiding in these marshes and mud flats for too many years. As stupid as it sounded, he could half believe some sorta higher power had brought this fat little man back into his life. Was it some sort of punishment? Was he supposed to make things right? His thumping head was about to explode from the questions and voices. His past hadn’t just caught up with him. It had caught up and wrapped its hands around his sorry neck.
Clayton Flint took off his faded, state-issued cap and folded it over in his hands. The cool breeze felt good on his balding head, and he wiped his brow on his forearm sleeve. The same state seal logo had been engraved on the badge he’d lost a few years back. Well, not so much lost as skipped out across the inlet water not far from where they were standing. He’d been drunk, of course, and especially down in the dumps that night. He vaguely recalled saying something about quitting, right before sending the round badge skipping across the top of the water, where it disappeared into the blackness. He also recalled waking up the next morning right there in the mud. A tern, its black head shaggy as if it was wearing a wig, had eyed him with disgust from a few feet away.
“I quit,” Warden Flint had repeated to the bird, but it squawked at him and hopped away.
“I’m just asking for a place to do what seems right.” Billy Wayne dared look the warden square in the eye.