"She's a difficult pleasure," I said of my ex-wife. I was standing at the front door of her house, talking to her new partner, Sammy, a woman. My ex-wife, Lily, was not there.
We both took in
...
[+]
When I was seventeen years old, Sam and I spent all summer eating nothing but boiled
peanuts. Sam was my best friend, but he also had an incredible ability to flip a good day on its
side. He got me in trouble more often than not. "Always remember, I'm one of the greatest,"
he'd say with a crooked smirk, teeth all sharp and uneven. I used to call them shark teeth. He
would laugh and shove me slightly too hard, a move I chose to play off in the hopes of
somehow matching his unshakeable nature. He was homegrown, the stubborn sun, waking you
too early, or the burn your cheeks got from staying on the marina past noon. If he had ever
been to the doctor, they would have found saltwater in his veins. He knew the marsh like the
back of his hand.
One night in mid-June, I snuck onto the marina after dark. I'd heard stories about Mr.
Johnson's dock being a spare-parts wonderland, and I had the great idea to carry as many as I
could to the pawn shop. My grand plan to raise us from boiled peanuts to fried bologna status.
That's when the dock lamps buzzed on. The outline of the boats appeared as my eyes adjusted
to the light, trapping me where I stood. I turned on my heels to find that Mr. Johnson had
caught me and put a shotgun between my eyes. "I could've killed you," he barked. He didn't.
Instead, he spit out his dip and told me to get lost.
That's the thing I've found confuses people. I've never understood the idea that
kindness is synonymous with gentleness. Growing up, people scared you half to death to keep
you alive.
I believed that I had gotten off with a warning until my father called me downstairs the
next morning. Mr. Johnson was my father's long-time friend, often his companion when thenets were pulled in empty. I never saw them exchange words unless it was completely
necessary, like to get a light for one of their cigarettes. From my perspective, my father's best
friendships rested on a foundation of mutual disappointment.
Mr. Johnson had called early that morning to let Dad know that I had been snooping
around the dock and could've gotten hurt. At least I assumed this is what he'd done, as Dad
only told me that I had been signed up to work for Mr. Johnson all summer, with no pay. This
was the natural way to ameliorate my debt: apologizing without ever saying what you were
apologizing for. To actually speak it out loud would have been bad manners.
Sam came by every morning for that whole summer. He'd bring whatever food he had
scraped together, sometimes bait for the shop, and sometimes nothing. I was just as happy with
nothing as I was with the scraps. He would slip through the rotting wood, careful not to be
seen. In my father's eyes, he was an old dock rat from the wrong side of town with no
education or future. At least that's what dad said, or what I'd heard he'd said. In our town, the
truth was any story told twice. My father always assumed he was my boyfriend, demanding I
stay away from him. If Dad were a lesser man, he might've begged. That would have required
him to say it out loud, to say he was afraid to begin with. I always felt his silence made me a
stronger person, or at least not a dwelling one. Now I realize that the men of our community
were drowning in self-fulfilling prophecies. I'm still not sure whether this is a fault of the
South or a deep curse of anywhere on the precipice of an ocean.
The truth about Sam is that he wasn't any of those things until after they decided he
was. To me, he was charismatic and sickeningly charming. I could always tell when he was
about to polish a story until it came out shining in his favor. "Smart as a damn whip," my
mother would say before the inevitable: "only wish he would use it." She would sigh and shakeher head, noting that intelligence and destruction were too much to hold in one breath. He
could fix any boat with nothing but stubborn persistence, then take it out in a hurricane swell
for no other reason than to see what would happen. Under closer examination, this sort of
impulsivity might have been attributed to a deafening hopelessness. I personally believed he
was invincible.
I remember the day he died because the sky looked enormous. It seemed to reach all the
way to the line of the marsh, blending with the water. If I looked for too long, I imagined it
might have just swallowed me whole. Sam joked that morning that we hadn't survived the
humidity all this time to be taken out by the sun. What an odd thing to say. On the walk home,
the marsh was quiet. It was a rare occurrence for the usual chorus of frogs and crickets to be
silent. The wetland almost held its breath; even the cattails were frozen in suspense. I took my
time getting home, dragging my feet through the hardening mud. When I arrived, my father sat
me down with tears in his eyes, a sight I had only seen one other time in my life. He told me
that Sam's car had flipped on the interstate three times. He was dead. Pronounced at the scene.
For the first time that summer, the humidity became too thick to breathe. The kitchen was
completely still except for the hum of the fridge, while my body went hollow as if my lungs
had been completely ripped from their place in my chest. It's funny, I remember just about
everything except the feeling. I remember the way the salt water in my mouth began to taste
like blood. At the time, I thought this was some magical sign, connecting me to him. Over the
years, I realized there was no magic at all. My teeth had simply cut the inside of my cheeks.
Just blood. Marina rats whispered that the car radio had still been playing "Stairway to
Heaven" when the police arrived.I don't know where he was going that day. I had never seen him on any road that didn't
leave dirt caked to the bottom of his truck. To know him was to run the risk of having your jaw
go slack and your eyes widen any time he opened his mouth. I remember thinking it was fitting
in a way, god forgive me, his score had finally come up. He had always burned everything
down for no other reason than the reward of building it back up.
I don't know exactly what he'd been through. He often showed up with bruises that told
a story he wasn't willing to tell. We learned quickly not to reference his family, unless you
wanted a decent shiner. He was angry. Angry at the way people talked about him, thought
about him. Unfortunately, he didn't know any other way to stomach that anger than to prove
them right. After that day, I used to wait at the docks every night. I told anyone who would ask
that I liked to watch the tide roll in. Some small part of me always thought he'd come up
behind me and ask what I was looking at with a lazy smile. Even in death, he was this
unshakable force to me, still immortal. I'm not sure when I stopped looking out over the marsh
for him, but it must have been around the same time I accepted that Sam was one of many boys
who were blamed for their own drownings.
Sometimes I think Mr. Johnson's shotgun was the greatest act of kindness I've ever
experienced. Not because he didn't pull the trigger, but because it showed me how quickly you
can go from panicking on the surface to sinking under the tide. That's what I was raised on: a
kindness that was never gentle. Sam's affection was jagged and calloused. It was cold metal
rings against the back of my hot neck. Having your hands burned by a fraying rope before you
finally decide to let it drop. It all mattered to me more than any feather-light touch ever did.