Kings of the Earth: A Novel (26 page)

Tom

T
HE
L
ANDLUBBER
L
OUNGE
at Harpoon Gary’s was cave-dim at noon, lit mainly by some strings of Christmas lights worked into dusty fishing nets that drooped down from the ceiling over the bar. The lights blinked every now and then, making the broken fiberglass lobsters and the big satanic plastic crabs suspended up there loom like props from an old science fiction movie.
Revenge of the Appetizers
. DeAlton sat studying them and nursing his summer drink, a rum and Coke. He hated this place, he hated all of these places at the beach, but it was far enough from home that nobody he knew ever saw him come in and nobody he knew ever saw him leave. Donna didn’t like him having a drink. Not ever. He figured that it must have something to do with her old man, even though she’d been only what, three or four when he’d finally bought it.

It was cold in the lounge and it was no warmer in the sunlit dining room when he finished his drink and went out there to sit down and order a sandwich. They’d serve at the bar but those plastic lobsters and crabs gave him the creeps, so he sat all by himself at a square Formica table with an advertising place mat on it, looking through the picture windows over the beach. He had a little buzz from the rum and Coke and that was enough to last him. He refused a menu and asked the waitress for an iced tea and a club sandwich on white toast, light on the mayonnaise. He studied the place mat. It was sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce but dominated by various arms of the Coletti family, who had run the beach as long as he could remember. Dickie’s Family Restaurant. The Clam Shack. Harpoon Gary’s right here. Plus the Sea Breeze Cabins and the Beachcomber Motel and the Little Starfish Day Care Center. Not to mention the beachfront amusement park, where Old Man Coletti still ran the ticket booth and kept his hand in the till. The iced tea came and he poured two sugars into it from packets that advertised their manufacturer on one side and Coletti’s Cone Zone on the other. In case you couldn’t get enough sugar for free.

The lunchtime crowd began to trickle in. People with flip-flops and damp cover-ups and the shapes of their wet bathing suits soaking through their shorts and T-shirts. Not one of them working. Not today. Not like DeAlton Poole, who had places to go as soon as that club sandwich came and he got it eaten and cleared himself out of there. He tried to remember the last time he’d taken a day off and he couldn’t. Other than Saturdays and Sundays, which he had to admit even to himself was a better deal than he would have gotten if he’d stayed around the onion farm. But still. The life of a milking-machine salesman wasn’t exactly paradise.

The sandwich came and he opened it up to check the mayonnaise and put it back together. He picked up the iced tea and held it up to the picture windows to see if the sugar had settled out, and he put it down and stirred it again. That was when he noticed his own son, sitting out on the beach in an aluminum lawn chair. He had his back to him and his shirt off but it was Tom all right. Sitting there taking the sun and smoking a cigarette and fishing around in a foam cooler for a beer. On a Tuesday. How dare he. Wasn’t he supposed to be working construction somewhere?

DeAlton took his time eating his club sandwich. He watched his son put out his cigarette in the sand and unwrap a Slim Jim and substitute it for the cigarette in between his teeth, sitting there like Roosevelt with the stupid thing just waving around. Sitting there watching the world go by. Looking at the girls in their bathing suits and not being subtle about it. DeAlton envied the beer and the beach chair and the boldness with which he looked at the girls. He even envied the cigarette, having quit a long time ago under Donna’s orders. About the only thing he didn’t envy about the whole scene was the Slim Jim, and as long as his son didn’t see fit to show up at his construction job on a routine basis he could keep eating those things for lunch instead of enjoying a nice club sandwich in a nice air-conditioned place like Harpoon Gary’s. He certainly wasn’t going to go out there and invite him in.

He finished his sandwich and got a free refill on the iced tea and mixed in some sugar and sat nursing it. Cleaning up the last of his potato chips and keeping an eye on his son through the window and checking out a twenty-something girl who’d come into the dining room with her bikini soaking through a
USA FOR AFRICA
T-shirt like an X-ray. He couldn’t help himself. She caught on after a while and shot him a look, and although he would have sat for longer if he could, he figured right then it was time to ask for his check. He was due at a farm over toward Peterboro in an hour or so and he didn’t need long to get there. He paid his check and went out into the parking lot and followed a little sandy trail full of footprints over to the beach. It was hot in the sun so he took off his sport coat and the sun on his bare forearms was even hotter. He thought about the Bedouins or whatever they were, those wandering tribes in the desert, and how every time you saw pictures of them they were all covered up like that Lawrence of Arabia. It made sense when you thought about it. He put on his sport coat again and walked over to where Tom sat, sinking into the sand as he went and getting his shoes all filled up with it.

“Hey, sonny boy. Catching some rays?” His voice came out louder than he meant it to.

“Hey.” Tom turned around in the folding chair, all nonchalant. But with the look of a high school kid caught with a cigarette in the boys’ room.

DeAlton hardly knew where to start. The lassitude, the beer, the fifteen or twenty cigarette butts arrayed in the sand alongside the folding chair like ruins in the desert. He made his decision and nodded down toward the crumpled butts, acknowledging them as evidence of Tom’s having been sitting out here for a while. “That Fazio’s giving you an extra-long lunch hour, is that it?”

What was Tom supposed to say. “I’m not working for Fazio anymore.”

“How long’s this been going on?”

“Awhile now.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

“You didn’t tell your mother.”

“I didn’t think I had to tell her either.”

DeAlton pushed the toe of his loafer against the folding chair. “Move,” he said.

Tom did. He vacated the chair and sat down gingerly on the lid of the foam cooler, not quite putting his whole weight on it.

DeAlton sat in the chair. He settled into it and folded his hands behind his neck and leaned his head back. “Now
this,”
he said, “is living.”

Tom indicated the cooler. “You want a beer?”

“You kidding?” said DeAlton with his eyes shut against the sun. “I’ve got to work. And don’t distract me from my point. Like I said, this is living.”

“I know.”

“You’ve got it all figured out, if you can do this on a Tuesday afternoon.”

“I guess.”

“What are you, working nights?”

“Kind of.”

“Kind of.”

“I’m kind of working all the time, Pop.”

DeAlton squirmed his butt around in the seat and said,
“Kind of working
sounds pretty nice to me. I could go for a career in kind of working.”

“Now come on. That’s not what—”

“You think they could use me?”

“Come on.”

“Are they hiring? Are they kind of hiring?”

“Come on, Pop.”

DeAlton slitted his eyes open just the least little bit and cocked his head toward Tom. “Because I could kind of use a job that let me kind of sit on my ass all day and look at girls in bathing suits.”

“It’s not what you think.”

DeAlton kicked the cooler. “You’re right. There’s refreshments too.”

Tom leaned forward. “Look. I’m making money. I’m paying my bills. You want more than that?”

DeAlton picked a little bacon from between his teeth. “I could use a straight answer.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re not working for the Italians, are you?”

“Not hardly.”

“The Italians with the suits, I mean. Not that big fat dope Fazio.”

“No. I’m not working for any Italians.”

“Good. I don’t want you running numbers or something like that. You want to do that, you can get a job over at Vernon Downs. A square job.”

“I’m not running numbers. I don’t even know what running numbers is.”

“Good.” He checked his watch. “Keep it that way.” He considered the time and decided what the hell, that farmer over near Peterboro could wait. He toed the foam cooler again. “On second thought,” he said, “how about giving your old man one of those nice cold beers you got.”

Ruth

A
THIN DRIZZLE
of freezing rain comes up but they pay it no mind. Soon something bites, and before Audie can notice or react the fish has nibbled free the cheese and made off with it. The hook comes up bare. Audie squalls and his father squalls too, each in his own way.

“How’d you like it if that was your dinner just swum off?”

Audie makes no particular answer and his cry of disappointment goes on as if the thought of hunger troubles him no more and no less than the mere loss of that lively fish, and from the well of his son’s stubbornness Lester draws more anger. He reaches around Vernon and knocks the back of Audie’s head with his knuckles and only the boy’s hat responds, not the boy himself, tilting forward and cocking crazily over his eyes. Lester snorts and reaches into his coat for his whiskey and while his gaze is downcast Vernon fixes his brother’s hat.

Lester has the cork between his teeth. Vernon spies it and has an idea and asks if his father has a knife, and Lester says if I had a knife I’d notched them poles myself. Can’t you remember that. Vernon says how about we just break that cork in half then and use it for two bobbers or not break it and use it for just the one. That way Audie can catch something.

His father breaks it with his teeth and makes two rather than have none for himself and he strings them up and rebaits the hook. He sets down the open flask on the rock by his haunch and he eyes it from time to time. He feels in his hip pocket for a rag that he might improvise a stopper but he finds none. Vernon shivers at his side and it startles him and his leg nudges the flask. It tilts away by a few degrees and wobbles and rights itself. He worries that he might get no fish out of this enterprise and lose his whiskey in the bargain.