Bad Things (4 page)

the background and the ocean looked gray and cool through the big

windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.

10 Michael Marshall

The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze

from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather

than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy,

however, and I’d been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging

tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.

The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed

when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced

a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sit-

ting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew

Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-

fi red oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two

or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped

by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in

America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fi sh. His wife

thought he’d got it wrong but she believed that about everything he

did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn’t prepared to take it as

the fi nal word. Ted is a decent guy but how he’s managed to stay afl oat

in the restaurant business for so long is miraculous. A rambling shack

overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out

to the sea—and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and

far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it

takes its name—the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively

as to become one of those places you go back to because you went

there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young, or, well, just

because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.

I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place

to do so. It wasn’t my place to make the damned things, either, but

over the last fi ve months I’d sometimes wound up covering the sta-

tion when Kyle, the offi cial thin-base supremo, didn’t make it in for

the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the

owner’s youngest daughter (of fi ve), a girl who went to a barely ac-

credited college down in California to learn some strain of human-

resources bullshit but dropped out so fast that she bounced. She

B A D T H I N G S 11

wound up back home not doing much except partying and smoking

dope on the beach with a boyfriend who made pizza badly—the ac-

tual dough being forged by one of the backroom Ecuadorians in the

morning—and couldn’t even get his shit together to do
that
six nights a week. This drove Ted so insane that he couldn’t even think about it

(much less address the problem practically), and so Kyle was basically

a fi xture, regardless of how searching was his exploration of the outer

limits of being a pointless good-looking prick.

If he hadn’t shown up by the time someone wanted pizza then I’d

do the dough spinning on his behalf, the other waitstaff picking up

the slack on the fl oor. I didn’t mind. I’d found that I enjoyed smooth-

ing the tomato sauce in meditative circles, judiciously adding mozza-

rella and basil and chunks of pepperoni or crawfi sh or pesto chicken,

then hefting the peel to slide them toward the wood fi re. I didn’t em-

ulate Kyle’s policy of adding other ingredients at random—allegedly

a form of “art” (which he’d studied for about a week, at a place where

they’ll accept dogs if they bring the tuition fees), more likely a legacy

of being stoned 24/7—but stuck to the toppings as described, and so

the response from the tables tended to be positive. My pizzas were

more circular than Kyle’s, too, but that wasn’t the point either. He

was Kyle, the pizza guy. I was John, the waiter guy.

Not even
the
waiter, in fact, just a waiter, among several. Indefi nite article man.

And that’s all right by me.

Wonderboy finally rolled up an hour later, delivered in an open top

car that fi shtailed around the lot and then disappeared again in a

cloud of dust. He went to the locker room to change, and came out

twitching.

“Glad you could make it,” I said, taking off the special pizza

apron. I didn’t care one way or the other about Kyle being late. I was

merely following form. You don’t let fellow toilers at the bottom of

12 Michael Marshall

the food-production chain get away with any shit, or they’ll be doing

it all the time.

“Yeah, well,” he said, confused. “You know, like, it’s my job.”

I didn’t have an answer to that, so stepped out of his way and went

back to waiting tables. I established what people wanted, and pushed

the specials. I conveyed orders back to the kitchen, instigating the

production of breaded shrimp and grilled swordfi sh and blackened

mahimahi, and the celebrated side salad with honey apple vinaigrette.

I brought the results back to the table, along with drinks and bonho-

mie. I returned twice to check that everything was okay, and refresh

their iced water. I accepted payment via cash, check, or credit card,

and reciprocated with little mints and a postcard of the restaurant. I

told people it had been great seeing them, and to drive safe, and wiped

the table down in preparation for the next family or young couple or

trio of wizened oldsters celebrating sixty years of mutual dislike.

After two cycles of this, the evening ended and we cleared the

place up, and everyone started for home.

It was dark by then. Unusually humid, too, the air like the breath of

a big, hot dog who’d been drinking seawater all afternoon. I nodded

good-bye as rusty cars piloted by other staff crunkled past me, on the

way up the pebbled slip road from the Pelican’s location, to turn left

or right along Highway 101.

The cooks left jammed together into one low-slung and battered

station wagon, the driver giving me a pro forma eye-fuck as he passed.

I assumed they all boarded together in some house up in Astoria or

Seaside, saving money to send back home, but as I’d never spoken to

any of them, I didn’t actually know.

As I reached the highway I realized Kyle was a few yards behind

me. I glanced back, surprised.

“You walking somewhere?”

“Yeah, right.” He smirked. “Mission control’s on the way. Big

B A D T H I N G S 13

party up the road tonight. We’re headed in your direction, if you

want a ride.”

I hesitated. Normally I walked the two miles north. The other

staff know this, and think I’m out of my mind. I look at their young,

hopeful faces and consider asking what else I should be doing with

the time, but I don’t want to freak them out. I don’t want to think of

myself as not-young, either, but as a thirty-fi ve-year-old among hu-

mans with training wheels, you can feel like the go-to guy for insider

information on the formation of the tectonic plates.

The walk is pleasant enough. You head along the verge, the road

on your right, the other side of which is twenty feet of scrubby grass

and then rocky outcrops. On your left you pass the parking lots of

very small, retro-style condos and resorts, three stories at most and

rendered in pastel or white with accents in a variety of blues, called

things like the Sandpiper and Waves and Tradewinds; or fi fty-yard

lots stretching to individual beach houses; or, for long stretches, just

undergrowth and dunes.

But tonight my feet were tired and I wanted to be home, plus

there’s a difference between doing your own thing and merely look-

ing unfriendly and perverse.

“That’d be great,” I said.

C H A P T E R 2

Within thirty seconds we realized we had squat to say to each

other outside the confi nes of the restaurant, and Kyle reached in

his T-shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. He lit it, hesitated, then

offered it to me. To be sociable, I took a hit. Pretty much immedi-

ately I could tell why his pizzas were so dreadful: if this was his stan-

dard toke, it was amazing the guy could even stand up. We hung in

silence for ten minutes, passing the joint back and forth, waiting

for inspiration to strike. Before long I was beginning to wish I’d

walked. At least that way I could have headed over the dunes down

to the beach, where the waves would have cut the humidity a little.

“Gonna rain,” Kyle said suddenly, as if someone had given him

a prompt via an earpiece.

I nodded. “I’m thinking so.”

Five minutes later, thankfully, Becki’s car came down the road

as if hurled by a belligerent god. It decelerated within a shorter dis-

tance than I would have thought possible, though not without cost

to the tires.

“Hey,” she said, around a cigarette. “Walking Dude’s going to

accept a ride? Well, I’m
honored
.”

B A D T H I N G S 15

I smiled. “Been a long day.”

“Word, my liege. Hop in.”

I got in back and held on tight as she returned the vehicle to warp

speed. Kyle seemed to know better than to try to talk to his woman

while she was in charge of heavy machinery, and I followed his lead,

enjoying the wind despite the signifi cant g-forces that came with it.

The journey didn’t take long at all. When we were a hundred yards

from my destination I tapped Becki on the shoulder. She wrenched

her entire upper body around to see what I wanted.

“What?”

“Now,” I shouted, “would be a good time to start
slowing down
.”

“Gotcha.”

She wrestled the car to a halt and I vaulted out over the side. The

radio was on before I had both feet on the ground. Becki waved with

a backward fl ip of the hand, and then the car was hell and gone down

the road.

This coast is very quiet at night. Once in a while a pickup will

roar past, trailing music or a meaningless bellow or ejecting an empty

beer can to bounce clattering down the road. But mostly it’s only the

rustle of the surf on the other side of the dunes, and by the time I

get home, when I’ve walked, the evening in the restaurant feels like

it might have happened yesterday, or the week before, or to someone

else. Everything settles into one long chain of events with little to

connect the days except the fact that’s what they do.

Finally I turned and walked up to the house. One of the older

vacation homes along this stretch, it has wide, overgrown lots either

side and consists of two interlocked wooden octagons, which must

have seemed like a good idea to someone at some point, I’m guessing

around 1973. In fact it just means there are more angles than usual

for rain and sea air to work at—but it’s got a good view and a walkway

over the dunes down to the sand, and it costs me nothing. Not long

after I came here I met a guy called Gary, in Ocean’s, a bar half a mile

16 Michael Marshall

down the road from the Pelican. He’d just gotten un-married and was

in Oregon trying to get his head together. One look told you he was

becalmed on the internal sea of the recently divorced: distracted, only

occasionally glancing at you directly enough to reveal the wild gaze

of a captain alone on a lost ship, tied to the wheel and trying to stop

its relentless spinning. Sometimes these men and women will lose

control and you’ll fi nd them in bars drinking too loud and fast and

with nothing like real merriment in their eyes; but mostly they sim-

ply hold on, bodies braced against the wind, gazing with a thousand-

yard stare into what they assume must be their future.

It’s a look I recognized. We bonded, bought each other beers,

met up a few times before he shipped back east. Long and short of

it is that I ended up being a kind of caretaker for his place, though it

doesn’t really need it. I stay there, leaving a light on once in a while

and being seen in the yard, which presumably lessens the chances of

some asshole breaking in. I patch the occasional leak in the roof, and

am supposed to call Gary if the smaller octagon (which holds the two

bedrooms) starts to sag any worse over the concrete pilings which

hold it up on the dune. In heavy winds it’s disconcertingly like being

on an actual ship, but it’ll hold for now. In theory I have to move out if

he decides to come out to stay, but in two years that’s never happened.

I last spoke to him three months ago to get his okay on replacing a

screen door, and he was living with a new woman back in Boston

and sounded cautiously content. I guess the beach house is a part of

Gary’s past he’s not ready to divest, an investment in a future some

part of his heart has not yet quite written off. It’ll happen, sooner or

later, and then I guess I’ll live somewhere else.

Once inside, I opened the big sliding windows and went out on

the deck, belatedly realizing it was a Friday night. I’d known this be-

fore, of course, sort of. The restaurant’s always livelier, regardless of

the season—but Friday-is-busy is different from hey-it’s-Friday! Or