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Down the Beach from the Shore House

Jim Meirose

    Walk up the path between tall brown grasses in the sand and come over the rise. The sea appears with the boiling surf and the horizon marking off the curvature of the earth from far left, to far right. Walk down toward the sea in the loose sand. The sand quickly fills your shoes. The sunlight comes gently down from the cloudless sky above. It is not hot; it is not cold. The breeze comes off the sea. There’s a ship far out riding the horizon, balanced as though on a tightrope, on the line between sea and sky.
    In the bedroom at the shore house the bullets slide one by one into the cylinder of the revolver. Six bullets in all, though only one will be needed. Which of these will it be? They are hard and cold. A finger runs along the curve of the bullets’ tips. The bullets were bought this morning. You scarcely knew what kind of bullets to get for the revolver that lay for so long atop the rafters in the basement. Father put it up there years ago, long before the accident. You took the revolver down and cleaned it up. You guessed it was a thirty-eight. You seem to remember Father saying that once. And, luckily, you guessed right. At the sporting goods store when you went to buy bullets the bearded man behind the gun counter spoke.
    Going to do some shooting?
    Yes.
    Well, have fun.
    He rang you up. You came home. There are twenty four bullets in a box. You only need six. Eighteen will go to waste—twenty three, actually, because in the end you will only have needed one.
    Go down to the sea where the water comes up. Walk along the line separating the wet and dry sand that the waves rush up and touch before falling back. Far ahead is the great fun pier. There are towers and wheels and clusters of dark boxy shapes and roller coasters. You walk along the wet edge of the sand just short of being touched by the water sliding up the sand toward you and ahead there lies a dark shape in the dry sand. A large horseshoe crab is dead on its back, its legs folded up and its body shrunken in the hollow of its shell. The long tail thrusts out on the sand. How did it come up so far onto the beach? Did it crawl up here to die on the sand? Did someone else flip it over on its back exposing all its tender parts to the sun? And is that what finished it off? The water stretches off to the left. The waves plunge. Are there more horseshoe crabs out there? You have been in swimming here many times. You have never seen one of these in the water. These kinds of creatures only seem to be visible when washed up dead. Your teeth bite down on your lip. How frightening; to be only visible when dead.
    Having loaded the revolver, pick it up and start down the hall toward the bedroom. The creaking floor threatens to betray you. He’s lying up the hall sleeping you hope, but the creaking floor is going to wake him. He sleeps a lot you know, in that bed with that damned television on—what else does a person have to do who has no use of their arms or legs? That locomotive should have finished him—he should have seen his life flash by before his eyes as the locomotive took him. How is it the whole of a person’s life can flash before their eyes in the few moments before the eyes close down for the last time over nothingness? That’s what they say happens you know. That’s what they all say happens.
    There’s a pathway of broken shells at the edge of the wet sand and you walk along it. Your shoes crunch along the path and you wonder how the shells got all broken up and why there are so many of them. Many small lives lie wasted here. Here and there a whole shell lies among the fragments. They are multicolored and they stretch out shining before you glistening in the sand ahead. The path of broken shells winds along and you walk along toward the far fun pier atop the path and it’s like walks you’ve taken before. It’s like when you walked with her along the sidewalk before Roosevelt school holding her hand, your flesh pressed against hers, and it felt wonderful. But now walking along alone like you are you rub your empty hands together and you thrust a hand down into your pocket and only the revolver is there. You hold the barrel of the revolver. It does not feel wonderful. You think of the five bullets that are left. Bullets are deadly things. You wonder will you ever fire a gun again.
    Going down the hall you find your hands start shaking badly. You stop dead before his bedroom door. No, it’s not time. You must have steady hands for this work. You think of his tranquilizers in the cabinet in the kitchen; the damned tranquilizers he needs to keep himself from going looney in that bed. You turn around and go back toward the stairs leading downward and you go down with your hand running along the banister and the stairs are creaking horribly—damn this house! You go across the living room with the huge threadbare furniture they bought God knows how long ago. The thick brown kitchen doorframe comes around you. The tranquilizers come down from the cabinet into your hand and you open the bottle and try to decide how many to take. They are small. You decide to take five—you’ve taken as many as seven before when you’ve stolen them from him—and you take five and wash them down with a glass of water and you sit at the kitchen table looking at the revolver as you wait for the pills to start working. Your hand shakes on the table and your leg shakes as well. You rest your hand on the gun and it is hard and cold. It rattles on the table under your trembling hand. You wonder how long you should wait—a half hour is what it takes for medicine to enter the blood stream when it’s taken orally, is what they’ve always said. So you sit and wait for the softness and light haze to envelope you and you think of other times you have waited like this. As a boy you waited at school for mother, but mother never came. School was out and everybody was gone but you were left standing there in front of the red brick school with your little book bag and mother never came so you started walking and you knew the way home but it was far. Where was mother? Your feet press against the kitchen floor and you grip the handle of the revolver; you lift it and wave it around and would that mother could be here now, so you could plug her. She had a lot of nerve leaving you at the school like that while she was down at Findon’s having forgotten about you like she used to do. The time goes and you walk and walk toward home alone; through shadow and shade, through fallen autumn leaves all dry, you’ve never walked home from school before, it’s only kindergarten after all. You walk so long and hard your side hurts. You stop walking and sit back down at the table and you squeeze the gun. You feel ready, so you rise from the kitchen table with steady hands and the light haze around you and the light feeling in your feet and in your hands and it is time to go upstairs again.
    The white and grey sea gulls stand around on the wet sand facing out toward the sea and you feel like you should go running at them waving your hands and making them fly but they stand there like statues. They do not fly, because you have not run at them waving your hands, and you walk along and the fun pier seems no closer; what was it, a mile up the beach or two miles up the beach and the sea gulls stand there now and then one takes off and one swoops down and lands but they are all like statues like that mime pretending to be a statue in the town square in England when you were there it seems so damned long since you were there—he looked like a statue, but was alive too, just like the sea gulls they are like statues but they are alive too, just like you, but are you like a statue—that is the question.
    The stairs are hard to mount, your feet feel so heavy, it’s probably the pills. Your feet feel like they used to feel when you walked through the mud down at the brook to bring in the rowboat and your feet would suck down into the mud and you would pull the boat just like he used to do when you were small, but now you were doing it for yourself and you pull yourself slowly up the stairs one tread at a time with the lily pads all about you and the flowers and the stench of shit mud. You’re pulling with one hand on the banister and the other holding the revolver. It’s like being in the army climbing the mountainside in Missouri with your rifle across your back and you were sick then, ended up with a case of the flu and ended up in the base hospital. Yes it’s like being in the army they put you in the army to shoot people don’t they? You start to think of him. You start to think of him lying in the bedroom waiting for his food to be brought up. You’re halfway up the stairs thinking of him but you cannot picture him. You struggle. God why is this all taking so long, why God, why? And why can’t you picture him? It’s like standing at the foot of an old grave trying to picture what is six feet down before you—it is too horrible to be pictured, too ugly, too ugly like him.
    A man in a wife beater undershirt and with a gut comes along walking a golden retriever down the beach and he passes you by and says hello. You nod and the dog has got a silver collar and the leash is blue. After you nod you think of when you used to be at work and you’d come down the hall with the grey rug and the yellow walls and sometimes the people passing would breathe out a hello and sometimes they wouldn’t, but if they held the door for you you’d always say thank you and so would they if you held the door for them but most of the time you would just walk along with your head down and walk by them and pretend you didn’t see them but you did, oh you did, you were aware of them, painfully aware that regardless of how they looked, they were all just like you. They were nothing to you and you were nothing to them. You half-stumble through the sand now—you’ve veered off the path of shells. You come back on it. The walking is better on the packed tight dead shells.
    At the top of the stairs you pause and grip the head of the banister and think what a long walk what a god-damned long walk to go from your bedroom to the kitchen to take a handful of pills and wait a while, and you stand at the top of the stairs the way you stood at the top of the tower in Providence that time so long ago, and you could look out and see the tip of Cape Cod and he was there with you he was always taking you someplace like that and once you even asked him why he did it; what kind of thing was that to ask your god-damned father, why are you taking me to the beach and to high point and to Cape Cod and to Gettysburg and to the airport to watch the planes back when you could go out on the roof in Newark and watch the planes close up and in the open. Lord God that was a long time ago. Why did you take me to places like that, you asked, when you did nothing else for me and you drove my mother mad with your raving and ranting and she ended up leaving and that was all because of you so why should I go to the airport to watch the planes with a smile on my face after you have done that? I was a fool to have done it with you, a damned fool.
    At last the fun pier comes up and you go under and above you roars the Wild Mouse and there are voices above too. You lean against the piling and the vibration comes down and into your spine and the Wild Mouse is racing and the fun pier is full of fun but you are below it, you are below all the fun alone in the shadows where it seems you have spent your whole life. Looking out through the forest of pilings you see the waves breaking against them. You wonder how long the waves have been pounding against them and how much longer can they last.
    Your hands are still shaking; damn it all, the pills are still not working. You stand at the head of the stairs riding in the car along in front of the church next to the high tension towers and you asked him—do you love my mother, father? Do you love her? And he says yes, yes, I love your mother. Then why are things like they are all the time, you think—why is there always screaming and yelling and why did she end up at Nora’s away from him and why were you laying in your bed reading when suddenly he flung the door open and threw the divorce papers onto your bed screaming Read it and weep! Read it and weep! to his own son a little boy his own damned son. Why do that to an innocent child and dare to say you love the child’s mother especially when asked when the car is crossing in front of the church by the high tension towers. And the son is damned for sure, that’s true. The son is damned for sure.
    The pilings are covered with barnacles to the high tide mark which is as high as your neck, and later, later, there will be water that high and you think what if I stand here as the water rises and the Wild Mouse goes on roaring overhead and the water will be up to my neck, but that’s not high enough for what you need, so you go out from under the fun pier and keep walking along the trail of broken shells and you will go as far as you need to find water that’s high enough for what you need. As you walk, you hold your stomach—you need it, you need it bad—you turn your face to the sea. You envy the endless mindless sea. What damned right does it have to be eternal when you cannot be?
    And still you stand at the top of the stairs remembering that Christmas, when he got drunk and threw you across the room into the Christmas tree and the tree went down and you ran next door to your aunt’s house and swore to her, swore on your life, that you’d never go to that house again but you went home later anyway after you got the shock of it all out of your system and he was asleep on the couch and he had tried to fix up the Christmas tree and you went to bed and pulled the covers up to your neck like you used to do when you were afraid you would die if you went to sleep and you would be so afraid and you know that when it was time to die you would just force your eyes to stay open—force your eyes to stay open and you will never die and you tried to do it in bed that night and you strained to keep your eyes open but then all of a sudden it was morning and the unknown had washed over you all night and death had closed your eyes so there was no more use standing there—so you turned to the hall and started down it. And years ago after you started down the hall, the accident happened that took his arms and legs from him and he just lies in the bed now and at last you come to the bedroom door, it rushes up to you and your hand is on the old oddly warm glass faceted knob. The knob rattles in your hand—God damn these old things in these old houses.
    There’s an abandoned sand castle on the dry side of the pathway of broken shells. There are holes dug and there are towers rounded off by the wind. It’s large—a gang of people must have worked on it, people of all ages from children to grandparents, and they worked hard to build something that’s like a life, something that only lasts until they’re gone and the wind and the waves have the time to finally have their way. There’s water in the deepest hole. You stoop and scoop up a palmful of water. The water is cold, and the water is forever, and the sand is forever, but the castle is only for until the wind and waves have had their way, after everybody is gone.
    The doorknob turns. The door opens. The shades are pulled. You look through the half light. His face looks at you, but you say nothing. His face is just a blank pale white thing. No features. He is no one. You hold the revolver behind your back and your eye falls on the bedside clock and the second hand turns you can see it turning and the minute hand is turning but you can’t really see it unless you stare at the tip of the hand a long long time, and the hour hand is turning but you can’t see it turn at all no matter how long you stare at the Goddamned thing—and he says a single word through the turning of the clock hands you have your eye on.
    Son, he says.
    No Read it and weep no Read it and weep.
    He dares say—son.
    His smile forms a black gap in his head. The locomotive took him years ago in the sand pits where he worked, he stepped around the end of a box car and the locomotive was there, and it took him. Snapped his neck just like that. And he hasn’t moved since, you’ve waited on him hand and foot, you’ve paid money for nurses to watch him during the day when you’re at work because he never had the kind of insurance that would take care of an old cripple for the rest of his life so you had to pay all your money for his care you’re like a poor person though you work like a dog in the office all day, yes you got an office job not like him, that you struggle to hang onto and though you make good money it’s like you’re a poor person. He looks at you after he says Son. He expects you to come in and do something for him, like you always have before since his arms and legs died.
    There’s a cluster of live clams lying strewn across all closed up tight that’s how you can tell that they’re alive, they lie there closed up tight and you remember the company picnic where Andrea brought clams and you learned how to open a clam and you ate the clams down raw—and you wonder if these clams here on the beach are the kind you could open with a knife and scoop out of their shell and pop into your mouth like life does to people you know you’re scooped out of your shell every day of your life and you’re popped into the mouth of all the onrushing tomorrows that only end you up in one end place. You kick at the clams and one rolls across and you wonder why they’re just in this spot, like someone had a bucket of them and stopped here and decided to dump them right here, like they weren’t needed any more, like there had been some reason to gather a bucket of them but the reason has been forgotten and maybe even never was. You walk past the clams down the pathway of broken shells and there’s another pier in the distance with nothing on it. It used to be a fun pier too but now it’s a nothing pier and it’s about a mile off you figure, so you leave the clams alone where they’ve been dumped and you wish you could find the boy who dumped them out you’d say how dare you treat a living thing that way. Like someone should have told your father.
    You walk up to his bed with your hand behind your back and the handle of the gun is cold and he smiles like he’s glad to see you, you will now pull down the covers and expose him and move his limbs like they are really ever going to move again but you move his limbs so they don’t coil inward and get all gnarled, it’s a good thing he has you to make him look presentable, and you will change the bag at the end of his catheter, and you will bring him oatmeal and spoon it into his mouth and he will eat it greedily that’s the only thing you give him to eat anymore, because he doesn’t have the muscles in his jaw and neck to chew since the accident he’s really a mess a god damned mess but still he dares lie there and say that single word a second time.
    Son—
    Is this the only word he knows how to say? Is it?
    There’s a family up on the beach and there’s a leaning beach umbrella like the one he used to bring to the beach years ago before the trouble when you would go to the beach and he’d work thrusting the shaft of the umbrella into the sand—and the family has beach chairs and a cooler and there’s a blanket spread out under them and the man is the husband he is big and pot bellied and the woman is slight with short black hair and there are children digging in the sand and you remember what it was like to sit digging in the sand, for no good reason but to dig in the sand and you’d make a pile of sand by the hole and sometimes you’d go down to the water and get a plastic bucket of water from the sea and come back and fill the hole, like every hole is a yawning gulf waiting to be filled they say it’s true nature abhors a vacuum like the hole of a vacuum that was left when she left him and went to live with Nora in South River and all of a sudden the family on the beach looks ugly to you and they are all wearing masks twisted and grotesque tied on their faces with string tied in the back and you think all people are wearing masks.
    The mask lying on the pillow in the bed smiles at you and his hair is neatly combed with a nice sharp part down the side that the nurse put there this morning and you wonder would his hair stay all nice like this forever because he can’t move his head you know, it just lies there on the pillow gathering dust and the blankets are pulled up to his neck and he says the third through the seventh words he’s said since you entered the room.
    Good to see you son—
    And the eighth through the eleventh.
    Turn on the television.
    You stop counting the numbers are getting too high.
    Please turn on the television for me son.
    There’s a lifeguard station up on the beach all painted white and stoutly built like they are—and you can’t imagine sitting up there being all responsible for all the irresponsible multicolored lives running mindlessly around the beach. You’ve got to see when they go out too far—when they challenge the ocean, no one has the right to challenge the ocean so you’ve got to stand up and blow your whistle. But there are no whistles now, the lifeguard station is empty and you wonder where the lifeguard is I bet he’s glad to be off the God-damned beach with all the responsibility now when he’s off the God-damned beach he can be just as irresponsible as everybody else you bet he stands at the bar with a beer all drunk all drunk all drunk all drunk.
    I am hungry, says the mask in the bed lying on the pillow. What’s on for tonight?
    He’s got to be up in the twenties of words said now. When will you say your last word—what will it be? There’s a last everything and there’s last words and last sights and last sounds and all that but you won’t know them when they come and neither will he because as soon as they go there is nothingness just like the nothingness before you were born or when you’re asleep with no dreams to remember its all nothingness—you swing the gun out into sight and the mask’s mouth opens into a black hole that begs to be filled because nature abhors a vacuum.
    A jetty comes up on the left, all black rock and pounding surf, and you think to walk out onto it but no, it’s much too dangerous and you might trip and fall and break an ankle and never get to where you are going where are you going anyway who cares—the end of the jetty is all pounding surf and you remember when you were a boy there’d be fishermen on the jetties always at the very end where the water’s deepest where the big fish are always at the very end where the biggest waves pound and none of those fishermen ever fell and broke their ankles—so you think you’ll walk out into the jetty but no its too dangerous because there are no fishermen on this one so it must be the most dangerous one of all.
    The gun comes around. The black hole in the mask begs to be filled the hole in the sand begs to be filled nature abhors a vacuum a bullet comes out the barrel and goes into the mouth. The eyes pop. The room echoes. Your ears ring. The eyes say one word.
    No—
    The gunpowder’s strong smell fills the room.
    The hole in the mask fills with blood and it spills out down onto the blanket. He says nothing now, just lies there a shape under the blanket with a blood filled hole for a mouth and his eyes stare at you—but they are looking through you lifeless and unfocused as you stand by the bed your eye follows the curve of the headboard that has witnessed so much—the rest that is earned at the end of the day, the making of lives, and a death.
    The abandoned pier comes up and you walk under it and it’s much like the fun pier underneath but there is silence above you and the sunlight shows through the gaps between the boards of the pier. You look back and a mile back you see the outline of the fun pier where all the noise is but there is no noise here just the waves lapping up to the pilings and the barnacles up to the high water mark and again you think what if I stood here, I am all alone here not like the fun pier with the roaring Wild Mouse up above and all the people who’ve bought tickets at a ticket stand tickets to fun there are no tickets to fun for you, there is no ticket stand on this pier it stands weathered and rotted and again you think of the fishermen out on the far ends of the jetties and at the far end of the fun pier and you wonder why there are no fishermen here where surely there are more fish and deeper wilder darker water its always deeper and wilder and darker where something’s abandoned.
    At the bedroom window you draw back the shade and sniff in the gunpowder smell and look out over the yard he used to mow that you mow now but that you will never mow again and you try and let go of the gun, to drop it to the floor but no it goes in your pants pocket after all it might come in handy later you run your finger along the sill and it comes up covered with dust. Nobody cleans the place any more like she did before he drove her away. He drove her away and she died years back and what right did he have to outlive her anyway? You feel him behind you. It smells like meat here. You must leave the room now. Your eyes stay off him. The television’s there and he had wanted it on so you switch it on—and the picture comes up a car commercial and someone’s driving a car too fast much too fast why are they allowed to sell cars on the basis of how fast they are when the speed limit’s never more than sixty-five at least not in this state anyway—and the driver’s doing doughnuts and it’s so stupid and shallow and it says it’s four hundred fifty a month to lease the damned thing—you leave the television on for him like he wanted and you go out of the room into the hall, and you lightly close the door behind you like someone’s sleeping like you’d close a door when there’s a child sleeping that you have just labored to make go to sleep with story after story after story after story and their little eyes have turned back white in their heads and the lids have fluttered closed down.
    Past the abandoned pier there is nothing and nobody just the endless stretch of sand ahead and the broken shells are not catching the light not glinting in the light like they had before. The sky is lowering here and the waves are larger and louder and the air is somehow colder and you walk out from under the pier into this wilderness only knowing you’ve got to keep walking, keep moving. There’s seaweed strewn across the sand, and driftwood, and nothing else except far before you the beach stretches to the horizon and on the right there are dunes and forlorn wild grasses and on the left is the pounding surf and your hand is on your gun the cold of the barrel is there. Around the gun, the cold has always been there.
    Outside the house you go to the garden and think to fill your pockets with stones, like you always read they’d do when they meant to take a last walk by the water, but there are no stones just great bricks edging the garden they’re too big they’re much too big and you run a hand down the leaves of a rosebush and strike a thorn and you stick your finger into the water of a birdbath to kill the pain and you think of the shore less than a mile away, he always wanted to live at the shore, and he got his wish though there was no walking on the beach for him the locomotive saw to that and now you have seen to all the rest.
    A red-lettered steel sign comes up by the water’s edge. Danger rip currents it says on the rusted metal and the cold presses against your back and the water is somehow calmer here, though it’s all black and roiling and the currents are sucking out out to sea anything that goes in the water and you walk off to the left onto the wet sand and you stand there, hands hung at your sides, considering the water the black sucking water.
    You leave the garden—you go toward the beach. The sea pulls you toward it. The sidewalk is sandy. The sand is yellow. The water is deep. One block, two—just two blocks. All the houses have yellow yards not like where her mother used to live with the large lush lawn—and you come to the end of the road and walk up the path between tall brown grasses in the sand and come over the rise. You’re waist deep and swept off your feet and nature abhors a vacuum sucking and the last thing is that the ocean appears with the boiling surf and the horizon marking off the curvature of the earth from far left, to far right.

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