Further Joy

by John Brandon

  Melanie was wearing skimpy, strappy shoes. She had a lawyer job where she breezed around town to meetings and Mike had a lawyer job where they chained him to a desk.

  “I think that’s when I got my first glimpse of a side of Mike I see all the time now. The big, jovial bully. He hid that part of himself for years, but that was a glimpse of it. I was just thinking about it today.”

  “We were pretty drunk.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “That’s a given.”

  I watched her eyes get still and dark then, her thoughts drifting off somewhere, away from Paso Robles. She had a little nervous tic she did with her fingernails, and for a moment it seemed she forgot I was standing there. I picked up a hand towel and folded it into a square, then refolded it. When she finally looked up at me, she only asked how long till dinner.

  “Two hours max,” I said. I had the knife and a cutting board ready, and she handed me the cabbage.

  “You couldn’t fry an egg in college, and now you’re like a chef.”

  “When we lived in that town in Tennessee there were no restaurants.”

  “You see that, you acquired a new skill. I haven’t acquired a new skill in a long time.”

  “People who fail a lot wind up with a bunch of new skills,” I said.

  Melanie shrugged, not quite surrendering the point. She straightened some spice bottles, making it where all the labels showed, before easing herself down off the island and making toward the garage, plucking her running sneakers from the bottom of the stairs as she passed. I heard a door open and close, and then another, and then the hum of the air conditioner. I always felt relieved and anxious at the same time, alone in that cavernous house. I looked out the kitchen window, knowing there was nothing out there but the next lawn.

  There’d been talk of polished concrete for the restaurant’s floor, but that turned out to be a lot of hassle. I ended up putting down simple, smoke-gray tiles. They were cool and smooth, and I took my shoes off some days and padded back and forth in the long dim room of the future restaurant I would work in and slightly own. It was getting harder to kill time, so one afternoon I took a walk. I’d forgotten about walks. The city had posted new red signs along the beach warning of the fledgling blacktips. The most recent victim had been an elderly woman collecting shells. The shark had leapt from the shallows and beached itself, such had been its lust for the lady’s bony, purple-veined ankle. They’d had to kill it to make it let go. It had been out of the water for ten minutes and was still holding fast. They’d gouged its eyes, tried to tempt it with a half-rotted squid, put a lighter to it. Finally, they’d sliced it open and bled it dry and it quit gasping.

  ***

  Mike had told me he and Melanie were trying to get pregnant, and several nights in a row I heard them going at it from my room. Mostly I heard her. I’d be stretched out on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling, and suddenly I’d hear a noise and realize it was Melanie. It would get louder and then turn into these sharp, breathless chirps. I’d stay right where I was, frozen. It made me jealous, of course, but I also felt like I was doing something wrong, like I should’ve snuck outside and waited out there until they were done. The next afternoon I’d feel awkward when it was Melanie and I alone, chit-chatting while I cooked, but then Mike would come home and we’d all sit and chew our fork-tender meat and Melanie would have a glass of wine and there’d be earnest, decade-old music playing and all would be normal enough again.

  The routine became that I would go out to the porch with Mike after dinner and hang out with him while he smoked, usually with gin drinks, talking sometimes about the pitiful baseball team but mostly about the assholes Mike dealt with every day. Mike hated his boss. He hated his clients. Hearing about all these lawyers and the slimy companies they defended, it was easy for me to believe in that good-guy capital I’d built up.

  One evening, Mike clinked his ice cubes around and poured more gin. Then he looked me in the eye and said he envied me. His tie was loose, his eyes glassy. Melanie had gone to bed.

  “Your life doesn’t boss you around every second,” he said. “Every once in a while you get to choose your next action. I don’t remember what that’s like.”

  “I choose my actions, but I usually don’t choose them well,” I told him.

  “If I got turned loose on a Monday morning I’d probably wander around bashing into tree trunks, then drown in someone’s pool. I’m a red-tape artist, is what I am. I do the devil’s paperwork.”

  I looked upward and the sky was an empty screen. If Mike wanted a bunch of sympathy from me, that didn’t strike me as fair. “What about coaching that football team?” I said.

  “That’s for the firm. We have to do shit in the community.” He was chewing a mouthful of ice. “Everybody’s claiming little pieces of me. You’re like, a self. I know you think you’re on hard times, but at least you’re still whole.”

  My impulse was to run myself down, to convince him not to envy me, but I resisted it. Everybody had a self. Some people’s selves had gainful employment and understanding wives from well-off families.

  “I don’t want to have a kid,” he said. “That’s why it’s not working. My sperm have low morale.”

  “Still nothing?”

  “I’ll talk myself into it eventually. I’ll talk myself into wanting a child, just like I talked myself into going to law school.”

  He lowered his drink and then raised it back up and finished the thing. I didn’t know where his energy came from, if he was so unhappy.

  “You’re free, man,” he said. “You could buy a crappy old boat and sail to Mexico if you wanted. You could hop in your truck and drive to Alaska.”

  I laughed, and even to my ears it sounded caustic.

  “Fuck it,” he said. He was out of cigarettes. He flipped the empty box off in the bushes and pocketed his lighter. “I need to start rolling my own is what I need to do.”

  He slipped his tie off, folded it neatly, and lifted the lid of his monumental barbecue grill. He rested the tie across the grates, the apple-green silk lustrous even against the polished heating elements. Then he brought the lid back down, grinning bleakly.

  The next afternoon I hung around the restaurant while the guy from the air-conditioning company installed the new unit and inspected the ductwork and put in new filters. I decided to skip dinner at the house in favor of sitting in the cab of my truck with the radio turned down low, a six-pack of tallboys for company. I was down at the beach, waiting for people to get stuck again. Well past midnight, I watched a Japanese pickup flounder and then sink itself to the wheel wells—the tiny kind of truck they don’t even make anymore. I went and said hello and hooked them to the hitch. A fresh Air Force cadet and his gal. They were so drunk, I felt I hadn’t had a drop. The boy kept talking about his uncle, saying he was going to do precisely as his uncle had told him, saying his uncle had instructed him to take this girl out on a date and get to second base. The girl cackled. The boy said his uncle had told him to send the wine back at the restaurant and damn if he hadn’t done it. He’d had one sip and sent it right back.

  The next time the sharks struck, it was a little girl. She lost a finger right in the middle of the morning. I heard the ambulance siren from the restaurant and walked down and got the story third-hand from an old jogger. The girl had been told to stay out of the water, to stay where it was dry and build sand castles while her aunt tanned and trolled a romance novel, but the wind flung the girl’s pail into the water’s-edge foam and she went after it. She didn’t know anything had happened, they said—it was a clean, almost surgical amputation—until she sat back down at her sand castle and saw blood running into the moat.

  The next time I took the 4x4 down onto the beach, Mike came along. I found my accustomed spot on a shallow rise just north of the pier and shut off the engine and the headlights. Mike stripped down to his undershirt, shucked off his shoes and socks. He opened the glove box and tossed in his phone. “We’ll leave the choke
collar in here a little while,” he said. I usually sat in the cab facing the pier, but Mike didn’t want to be cooped up, so we got out and I let the tailgate down. No tallboys tonight. Mike had hauled out gin and a bottle of tonic and a thermos full of ice cubes. He even had slices of lime in a plastic baggie and some ginger cookies a client had sent to his office. The breeze kept kicking up, blowing sand on our shins. There was a volleyball court not far up the beach, and now and then we heard the dull thud of a spike.

  “What now?” Mike said.

  “Now we wait,” I told him. “If we pull one out, that’s a good night. If we get two, that’s a great night. Three, historic.”

  “We’ll probably get half a dozen,” he said. “I’m something of a good-luck charm.”

  There was no moon yet. A jet passed overhead, trailing its roar behind it. We finished the first round of drinks and made another, drinking fast because of the heat. A bunch of people in matching red T-shirts hurried past, whispering urgently, participants in a scavenger hunt or some other wholesome mischief. Mike and I started talking about people we used to know in college, the successes and catastrophes. A guy we used to hang around with was running for Congress. Another was a professor at a school in Singapore. Another had his own show on the Weather Channel. A couple guys we knew had overdosed on drugs, and one had drowned in a river in Alaska.

  Mike ate the last cookie. He crumpled the box and tossed it behind him, into the bed of the truck. “I’m not going to ask anything about Dana,” he said. “If you’re not upset about her, I’m glad. If you are upset still, talking to me isn’t going to help. I just want to let you know, for whenever you want to take me up on it, that I’m acquainted with any number of legal secretaries who are having a hard time finding a decent guy. I’m not a matchmaker, but just so you know. My resources are at your disposal.”

  “So you’ll tell them I’m a decent guy?”

  “Well, I guess I have no idea about that. It’s always the ones like you that turn out to be serial killers.”

  “Killing people isn’t for me,” I said. “I don’t like secrets.”

  “Right,” Mike said. “And the dry-cleaning bills.”

  He surveyed the makeshift bar he’d set up, then looked at my glass and at his own. “I didn’t bring enough liquor, did I? I underestimated our thirsts.”

  “There’s plenty,” I said.

  “Yeah, for now.”

  He took a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket. He peeled the plastic wrapper off and let it fall away onto the sand.

  “I’m going to do something for you guys once I get some money saved up,” I said. “I appreciate you letting me crash. I’m going to get you guys a weekend vacation somewhere.”

  Mike got his cigarette lit, shielding it from the breeze. He took a steadying drag. “I like having you around. It’s a lot of house for two people. You could stay forever if it was up to me.”

  “If it was up to you? What, did Melanie say something?”

  “No, she didn’t say anything. When she wants you to go, you’ll know it. She doesn’t play any games, you have to give her that. When she wants you gone, she’ll walk right up and tell you.”

  “She doesn’t really go in for the passive-aggressive tactics, huh? The dirty looks and weird comments and whatnot.”

  “She’s pretty special in a lot of ways.” Mike was measuring his words now, like he didn’t want to be misunderstood. “She can be pretty demanding about the big picture, but when it comes to the details, the day-to-day, she’s surprisingly… lenient.”

  “Can I have one of those?” I said.

  Mike held out his cigarettes and then handed over the lighter. He didn’t make any comment about my wanting to smoke.

  “Even though it’s obvious she needs to lighten up—like, that’s the first thing you notice about her—you can tell she’s nowhere near the end of her rope,” he said. “She’ll never snap. She’ll just stretch and stretch.”

  I took our glasses and poured a fresh round. The thermos was one of these super-expensive models for people who went trekking in the desert, and the ice cubes were still in good shape. We weren’t getting a lot of traffic thus far. Maybe fifteen cars had driven by, among them a few compacts that were prime candidates for getting stuck, but they’d all motored in and out of sight without any trouble.

  “This is like fishing,” Mike said. “You hope nothing gets on your hook because then you’d have to put your drink down.”

  “Nobody’s out tonight,” I said. “It’s eerie.”

  After a minute we heard the approaching racket of motorcycles up on the street, that crackling growl. There was a whole company of them, their helmets flashing as they passed under the streetlights.

  Mike flicked his cigarette butt into the darkness. “They’re probably all lawyers,” he said. “They’re accountants for an insurance company that insures insurance companies.”

  We were close to drunk, and soon Mike started outlining all the sordid events that had occurred in the area in recent years—the driver’s education teacher who’d been fired for taking the school’s car during his planning period and picking up hookers, the girls’ high school soccer coach who’d taped himself getting a handjob from one of his players. Eventually I saw that he was building a case for not having children, for the unsuitability of the world.

  Around midnight a bunch of people started coming by on foot, strolling in the meek surf. Several couples. A gaggle of teenagers. None of them acknowledged us, as if we were part of the scenery. A mother and daughter ambled by. A lone old man. A woman in fancy party attire, clutching her skirt up out of the water.

  “I know what you’re really waiting for out here,” Mike said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “You want to be here when the next shark attack happens. You want to pull somebody out of the water and be a hero.”

  “Yup, that’s my plan,” I said. “I’m always out for the glory.”

  Mike put his hand on the back of my neck, rough but brotherly. The moon was still absent, but a scatter of bright low stars had fixed themselves where they belonged. Mike took his hand back and stood up from the tailgate and started walking toward the water, drink and cigarette in hand. He went out into the gentle slosh, his white undershirt seeming to glow. He went right in with his suit pants on, without looking back at me, up to his knees and then all the way up to his waist. Then he stopped and stood there, facing the whole unlit cove. I set my gin glass down. My throat was burning from the couple cigarettes I’d smoked. I started cleaning up our mess, capping the bottles and chucking the limes. I felt angry, I didn’t know at what. I heard a strange noise on the breeze, and I could tell it was coming from the direction of the water. Then I heard it clearly. Mike was laughing. He was out there howling at full voice.

  ***

  Cammie stopped by the restaurant. I was happy she caught me working. My head was all corners from the previous night’s drinking, but I was used to ignoring that. I looked up from some molding I’d decided to replace and saw her legs first, which put me in mind of tennis in a bygone era. She approved of everything I’d done, thought the place looked great. I showed her the big framed black and whites of Bryson’s Canal she’d ordered. I’d picked them up the day before, and I didn’t know where she wanted them hung. Bryson’s Canal was a local landmark. A hundred years ago, probably more, some guy got it in his head to cut a canal all the way across Florida. He made it a few miles inland before the government stopped him, but the part he’d dug was still there, straight as an arrow, lined with alligators.

  Cammie hadn’t come around sooner, she said, because she wanted to be stunned by the changes, like in a before-and-after photo. She’d been dropping my pay off at Mike and Melanie’s, a stack of paper-clipped twenties with a ten on top, same every time.

  “What’s with the ashtray out front? You smoke now?”

  “Trial basis,” I said.

  I asked about her girlfriend, just being pol
ite, and Cammie sighed and said she was threatening to move to Las Vegas. Mini-mansions for a song out there. Real casinos to guard. Casinos that didn’t have a bow and a stern. Cammie’s girlfriend enjoyed hiking, apparently, which wasn’t a thing to do in Florida.

  “You think she’s serious?” I said.

  “Hard to say. Last summer she told me she was thinking about shaving her head, and I thought she was kidding because it was so hot out. I came home the next day and there she was, bald as anything.”

  “She’s bald?”

  “Not anymore. She’s got the cheekbones and the eyes, so it doesn’t really matter. But no, she let it grow back out.”

  I wiped my hands off on the front of my pants, mopped the sweat off my face with my T-shirt. I guess I’d been waiting for a shoe to drop, whether I’d known it or not. Eager for it, in a way. “What would happen then, if she really wants to move?”

  “Well, I guess she’ll get a Nevada driver’s license. Go see Hoover Dam. Wait for her furniture to arrive in the big truck.”

  “I meant what would happen with the restaurant. I guess I know the answer.”

  Cammie’s eyes registered the question. “How do you know I’d go with her?” she asked.

  I was straightening things on the steel countertop now, my hand tools and such. I normally just left them in a jumbled heap. “Because all towns are the same if you peel away a layer or two, so why not move? They all have frozen yogurt and a Target, right? But they don’t all have a girl you love.”

  Cammie reached over and squeezed a drill bit with two fingers. “Yeah, I probably would,” she said. “I’d probably go to Nova Scotia if she wanted me to. She’s really good for me.”

  “It doesn’t have to be Las Vegas. This is about the point where all my projects fall through. I can feel it. This is right about the time.”

  “This isn’t really your project, so relax,” said Cammie. “I said moving was mentioned. I didn’t say it was happening. Who knows, she could be bringing up moving to leverage something else. It could be part of a strategy. Women, you know?”