Seagull Summer

by Shawn Hopkins

  SEAGULL SUMMER

  a novella

  S H A W N H O P K I N S

  Copyright © 2013 Shawn Hopkins

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-10: 1493756869

  ISBN-13: 978-1493756865

  For Nick, Cape May 1995 and so much more.

  1

  I close the trunk, wipe a line of sweat from my brow. Leaning against the tailgate of the Honda Pilot, I take a moment while my chest heaves beneath the faded Captain America T-shirt. I don’t know why I have it—the shirt. I don’t even like Captain America, and I’m not what anyone would be quick to label a “patriot.” Who cares? It was five bucks, and it fits me good—though my hot wife is quick to point out that I don’t fill it out the way I used to. Yeah, I know. The birth of our first child sort of cut into my gym time. Guess that’s life. Sorry, honey.

  The ocean breeze drifts down the narrow street and rattles an assortment of wind chimes. Some have been here for ages, and others still have price tags on them. It’s a peaceful moment, traffic slow on the one-way street that ends at the beach a few blocks down. It’s midweek, and by now most vacationers are already settled in, willing to surrender their parking spot for a fishing trip or a fancy dinner but nothing else. Once secured, parking spots are preserved with extreme prejudice here. I can’t believe I was able to park the Pilot here, right in front of the house. The odds are almost enough to make it suspicious. Or maybe it’s a sign. Good luck and fortune and all that stuff. Could be a reserved spot, though, which means I’ll be ticketed and towed. I look around for a posted sign, but don’t see one. I thank my lucky stars—whatever that means. The only vacant spot on the street, from Broadway to Beach, is now taken and from this point forward—or at least until next Wednesday—will be guarded vehemently by yours truly.

  Wednesday to Wednesday. I’ve grown sick of trying to finagle my way into town amidst the chaos that is the weekend in Cape May in August, so I decided on a new tactic. The results: no traffic getting here, no waiting for keys to the house, no scouring the city for a parking spot… So far, so good.

  I peel myself off the Honda and step up onto the curb and around a big concrete block that may or may not still be used for mounting horses. I don’t know what they’re called, never used one, never asked.

  I’ve been coming to this house my whole life, but the plaque hanging beside the door says that it was built in 1870, making it much older than I am. Almost 150 years of history have unfolded around it, and once again I imagine all that it has endured. The Gale of 1878, the New England Hurricane of 1938, the 1944 Great Atlantic hurricane, Hurricane Donna in 1960, Hurricane Gloria in 1985, the 1991 Halloween Nor’easter, Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and of course Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The list is long and comprises of many others, but I think those are the most notable. But then again, I suppose anything is of note when it involves loss of life, and I know plenty of people have died here from foul weather events I can’t remember. Were any of the victims staying here, in this house? I wonder. And that’s a thought I never had before. I’m not sure I actually like it.

  The porch steps are sturdy, and the blue and pink colors of the house seem to welcome me back. I’m not sure if there’s ever been a different color scheme associated with the place or not. I certainly can’t recall one. Seems the place has always looked this way to me, nothing ever changing, though I realize the unlikelihood of that being the case. Not that there are any old family photos that I can look through. If pictures were ever taken during our family vacations—or even of vacations before I was born—I’ve never seen them. I’m not exactly sure how far back my bloodline goes with the house, but I think my grandparents were friends of the owners. No, not the original 1870 owners, but someone further down the line. I don’t know the details, only that there was some kind of “in” that enabled my grandparents to bring my dad here throughout his childhood. By the time they kicked the bucket, my dad was married to my mom and had taken over the Cape May tradition.

  I introduced the place to my wife after we got married five years ago. She’s from the West Coast, and I was afraid the beaches and small waves of New Jersey wouldn’t be enough to satisfy my blonde surfer bride. I was wrong. Though she didn’t waste her time trying to tame the waves, she fell in love with the town. We’ve even talked about moving here, and the idea of spending a lonely winter on these streets has always fascinated me. Maybe I could start that novel I’ve been dreaming of writing. But, as with all things on this spinning rock, money seems to be the door to any opportunity. And for us, right now, it’s a door that’s shut, padlocked, bricked over, and buried. Sorry, babe. Shoulda married that scumbag lawyer I decked the night before you said yes to me.

  The memory makes me smile. Never knock out a lawyer unless he’s so drunk he won’t know what happened once he’s come to, and he’s such a prick that no one will tell him. But he did have money, and he could’ve delivered the world—if nothing else—to my wife. I suppose I’m grateful she isn’t such a material girl, or else… Well, what’s the point of that thought? If she was, I wouldn’t love her the way I do, would I?

  “Jeff!”

  That’s her, my lovely Samantha, calling me from inside somewhere. When I open the screen door, grabbing a piece of luggage on the way in, I see our two-and-a-half-year-old son standing on the uneven, wooden floor with his shorts around his ankles and a zucchini-sized piece of crap in his hands. He’s squeezing it, and it’s beginning to ooze through his little fingers. Well, we don’t call him “Doo-Doo Dougie” for nothing.

  I wonder if, in the 150 years it has witnessed people within its walls, the house has seen this type of behavior before. I’m guessing not, as I’m pretty convinced that this practice is wholly unique to my son. He just seems to love his crap. I don’t get it.

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me, dude,” I say to him.

  He looks up as Samantha shakes her head in disgust. Not disbelief, because we know by now that when it comes to poop and our precious child, the possibilities are endless. It is, however, absolutely disgusting every time.

  Doug smiles. “Baddah up,” he says, exercising his two-year-old phonics.

  And before I can stop him, he swings the log at an invisible pitch seen only by him. It would’ve been a home run our Phillies could have used the other night. Instead, in this reality, the shit breaks off right above his hands and flies through the air like a missile, straight at Samantha.

  She can’t get out of the way fast enough, and it’s a direct hit to her stomach, marking her white tank top with a green-brown souvenir that can’t smell good.

  She throws her hands up, plenty of disbelief on her face now, and stares down at the crap that has fallen between her feet.

  I can’t help laughing. It’s horrible, I know. I should be reprimanding, grounding, sentencing time-outs left and right, but I can’t control myself. It’s hilarious, and the tears come streaking down my face. Doug finds it equally funny, which is bad for the future of our family, and I know I need to stop. But I can’t breathe.

  Samantha’s face clouds. Guess she doesn’t find it as funny as I do. She bends over, picks up a handful of our son’s feces, and throws it with all the force she can muster—which is a heck of a lot considering she was a pitcher in college. But unlike the underhanded softball release, this pitch could have come from any major league baseball mound. At least that’s how it feels when it hits me in the head and explodes.

  I stop laughing when the urge to vomit hits me just as hard.

  “Can’t exactly punish him now, can you?” she asks, angry. She looks at her hands and goes into the kitchen.

  I hear the sink go on as I stare at Douglas, poop sliding off my head and plopping on my shoe.

  “We gotta talk,”
I say.

  2

  Our marriage is a good one, always has been. Storybook start, love at first sight, all that. We still get along. There’s still romance, even despite Doug’s top-secret mission to keep us exhausted and apart. Still, the last few months have been tough, and we’ve been anticipating this vacation as a sort of recharge for our relational batteries.

  We debated leaving Doug with her parents, but her parents are insane. Unfortunately, they followed their daughter over here from the Golden State as soon as they heard of her pregnancy. I don’t trust them. Samantha knows this. I suggested my parents instead, and she reminded me that they were dead. I still trust them more.

  One time, her dad took Doug out into the snow to make a snowman. In his grandfatherly excitement, he’d forgotten to put shoes on my boy. When Douglas started crying, Grandpa threw his arms up in frustration and cried out, “What the hell are you crying about, boy? Your old man raisin’ you to be some kinda wuss?” At which point, he turned around and went inside, slamming the door closed on the one-year-old, barefooted child in the snow. Thankfully, Grandma was watching from the window and went to Doug’s rescue. When Grandpa finally realized what the problem was, that he’d forgotten to put anything on the kid’s feet, he tried to make it up to his grandchild by serving him a steaming hot mug of cocoa. The scars still mark Doug’s legs.

  So, we decided to bring Douglas along. We love him, and he really does belong with us. I just hope we can find a way to trick him into letting us relax. Work has been killing me. Late nights, weekends. It’s been horrible, and if I could, I would’ve quit last year. Oh well, I hear it’s the American Dream.

  I bury my feet in the sand and close my eyes for a second. The sun is hot on my skin, but there’s a cool breeze off the ocean that makes it bearable. I love the sound of the waves. It pulls me into dreams of distant times and places, worlds even. Douglas is asleep in the little red tent beside me. Samantha is lying on her stomach, her bikini top undone, the sun painting the white line across her back red. We’re not big on sunscreen. Vitamin D deficiency, chemicals… Burn, peel, tan. That’s my method. Of course, we’ve gotten some kind of all-natural something or other for Doug. If he were to get sunburn…well, Cape May, New Jersey, might as well be Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

  “You awake?” I ask Sam.

  No answer.

  I put my sunglasses on and begin to survey the platter of sizzling flesh surrounding me. Some look better than others. Some look tempting, hot. Others look like they should be clapped with some sort of human decency fine. If you’re gonna show it, it shouldn’t make me queasy. At least not in this heat. But that’s just me. I’m evil, I know.

  I always find myself a little baffled by the turn modesty has taken in just the last fifty years, going so quickly from one thing to nothing. I don’t know whether it’s a sign of de-evolution or human progress. Guess it depends on your overall view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Either way, I don’t complain. Just don’t ask me not to look, because that would be completely unfair. Only my wife can ask me not to look at the sweat-gleaned curves pressing in on me. But I know she won’t. Which is why I don’t. At least not long enough for it to matter.

  The Beach Boys are playing from a nearby radio, the fun times of those simpler days swimming over the wind and throwing random notes between the crashing waves. I shut my eyes again and allow the beach to transport me back in time to days I’m much too young to have lived through.

  I wake up when a loud screeching sound pierces my ear. I sit up straight in my chair as a seagull takes flight from off Doug’s tent.

  “Damn bird,” I mumble. I hope Samantha didn’t hear me. She doesn’t tolerate my potty mouth. She’s a better, more sophisticated person than I. Perhaps some of us are evolving while others, like me, are in fact returning to our Neanderthal roots. I guess it could also be the universal struggle between good and evil.

  The bird flies over the water, gliding until catching a gust of wind. It’s snatched away by an invisible hand, like a banking F-14 or some other bird of war. I wonder what it would be like if birds dropped napalm instead of crap.

  I check on the rest of my family. They’re still asleep. The sun seems to be in the same place I left it, and I figure I may have been asleep for half an hour. Or maybe five minutes. I’m too civilized to know anymore. And plus, I don’t really care. I’m on vacation.

  I close my eyes.

  * * * *

  “Hey!”

  I open my eyes, and a huge mass of light blinds me. I reflexively shoot my arm up to shield my face from its glory. Or, at least, that’s what I try to do. My arms don’t move. I hear laughter. It’s my wonderful bride and my adorable son. I wonder what’s so funny even as I realize that I can’t move my other arm, either. Or my legs. Then I become aware of a pressure sitting on my chest. They’re laughing louder. The sun is still in my eyes, and I try to squint through it, to see what’s going on.

  Something’s poking my chest, and I can see my darling boy with a sharp piece of driftwood in my mind’s eye. He’s laughing like it’s the funniest thing he’s seen since Chicken Little’s pants fell down in that movie he got for his birthday.

  “Ouch! That hurts! Quit it!”

  A shadow crosses over me, and I can see two seagulls standing on the sand where my chest should be. There’s goldfish—the snack, not the pet—sprinkled over me. A sharp beak plunges into the sand, and I feel it again. Death by bird pecks. My family can’t stop laughing. Wonderful.

  “Shoo!” I shout.

  The birds pause, looking at me as if considering my request. Or at least the absurdity of it. “Get away!”

  They go back to pecking, and I think they’re now laughing along with the neighbors who have since joined my loved ones in humiliating me.

  With great effort, I sit up, the sand covering me first cracking and then falling away as I rise, reborn, from the earth. The birds aren’t laughing now; they’re getting the hell away from me before I can snap their necks and jam their heads into the hairy ears of those sitting closest to us.

  “Funny,” I say, looking down at the red marks on my chest. One of them is oozing.

  Douglas is running in circles, throwing his arms up in the air and laughing so hard I’m not entirely convinced it’s genuine. He’s just acting nuts.

  “First shit on my face, and then you feed me to the birds. What’s next?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” she says. She gives me a look that I know well. Not because I see it often, but because it’s impossible to forget. Suddenly, I can’t wait for my little sport to go to sleep tonight.

  3

  I wake up in the middle of the night for some, unknown reason. Probably because the small, stiff bed is killing my back. The A/C is blowing away in the window across from us. A streetlight is peeking through the curtains, and I can see shapes of framed pictures that I know by heart. It’s strange how familiar the place is to me after spending just one week a year here.

  I look over and pull my share of the blankets out from under Samantha. She hates when I do this, but why should she get to sleep cocooned in warmth while I’m left to endure the frosted air blasting from the humming window unit with nothing but my own crossed arms? She doesn’t, and I give a hard yank.

  I don’t know what woke me up. I never do. I imagine the day will soon come when I’ll open my eyes to see Douglas standing beside me, staring at me. At which time I’ll probably shit the bed. Crap, I said shit. Even when I say it in my head, I feel judged by my highly evolved wife and smarter people everywhere. I’m so uncivilized. I should be sleeping on the beach beside a fire, my home a hollowed-out whale carcass or something. I’m a savage, and I have a savage’s potty-mouth mind. I better clean up my act soon, or Douglas is gonna start repeating my words at the most inopportune times—which will naturally lead to divorce. I don’t want a divorce. Oh well, it’s 3 a.m. I have better things to think about.

  Before I close my eyes again, I
can see a bird standing in front of the other window—the one the A/C isn’t installed in. The street lamp makes it a dark silhouette, and it casts a partial shadow into our room and across the bed.

  Damn bird. I touch my chest. It still hurts.

  I drift to sleep. Doug will be waking up at about 5:30. He always does. I don’t understand it. I suppose at two, he thinks the world is worth waking up for every day. Obviously he hasn’t been watching the news, hasn’t been dumped, fired, or expected to make ends meet in the rat race we call freedom. Uh oh, I’m getting cynical. I have to get some sleep if I’m gonna have the energy to walk him—and by “walk,” I mean “carry” him—to the coffee shop. We’ll catch the sunrise on the beach, watch the dolphins.

  Dolphins. I heard—and then confirmed via an internet search—that dolphins gang rape people. Unbelievable.

  The bird takes off.

  I drift back into sleep.

  * * * *

  “You see them?” I ask Douglas, pointing out to the rolling seas.

  “Yeah!” he screams, jumping up and down, his fists thrusting back and forth with some kind of sound effect. “Dolphins! Dolphins! Dolphins!”

  What’s he doing? Is he pretending to kill them? Was I like this as a child? So violent and gross? Must get it from Sam’s parents. Yuck.

  There’s at least six of the rubbery mammals breaking the surface in rainbow arcs. I bring the coffee to my mouth, enjoying the morning breeze and the empty beach. And my son, of course. As he chops Flipper to pieces in his young and impressionable mind. Suddenly, I wonder if I did this to him somehow. Foul mouth aside, I don’t think I’m that much of a barbarian.

  Nah, blame it on the in-laws.

  Though I am enjoying the moment, part of me misses the concrete bed I’m paying a small fortune to sleep in for the week. I get up for work every day at the crack of dawn. It would be nice to sleep in just one time this year. Just one stinkin’ time. But I don’t anticipate that card being in my deck any time soon. Samantha gets that privilege. She’s still in bed when I leave every day, Douglas having eaten his cereal with me and waving goodbye out the window. Then, after I’m gone, he climbs back in bed with Sam, and both of them sleep ’til 8 or 9. Must be nice.