Mr. Tall (3 page)

“Liar. You think I don't know why you give me all that preppy L.L. Bean crap for my birthday? And you want to hear about Donnie Payne? I'll tell you about Donnie Payne. Donnie Payne
liked
my clothes and Donnie Payne
liked
the way I smelled and Donnie Payne flat-out
loved
my boobs, and if Donnie Payne hadn't got drunk and run around on me with Carmen Skipper I'd still be married to him. I wouldn't have pissed on you if you'd been on fire.”

“Cheryl, don't say that.”

“And I'd have been better off, too. You've been looking down on me from the moment you walked out of Mr. Putnam's office in that stupid necktie and I'm done with it. I've never done anything but bust my ass my whole life and I've tried to be a good mama to Misti since the day she was born and look how it's all turning out. It ain't fair, none of it. So, fuck you.”

The Wade-n-Sea sign was so tall that from the parking lot Darryl couldn't even see the letters. The steel stalk simply seemed to disappear into an electrical pink cloud. Darryl thought briefly about climbing it. Out of sight overhead the neon spat and hummed.

On the far side of the swimming pool the old woman waved a long-handled skimmer through the water, while beside her the old man slouched in his wheelchair. Occasionally he lifted an arm and pointed. Despite the blue light shimmering upward from the water, the fog rendered their forms incorporeal. Darryl tiptoed carefully across the parking lot toward the pool, bent slightly at the waist, staring at the ground. He didn't have on his glasses and didn't want to step on anything that would hurt his bare feet. He hadn't been able to find one of his shoes.

“Everything all right in there?” the old woman asked.

“Ma'am?”

“The room. Everything all right with the room?” She pulled the skimmer out of the pool and tapped the mesh twice against the white gravel behind her just off the walkway. Dead and dying moths, maybe hundreds of them, bobbed and fluttered on the surface of the water.

“Oh, yes, ma'am,” Darryl said. “The room's fine. Except maybe the toilet. The toilet doesn't flush very well.”

“Not enough fall,” the old woman said. “It was like that when we opened the place in fifty-one. Nothing to be done. I got a plunger you can use.”

“We're good for now, I think,” Darryl said, reflexively touching his back pocket. He had stopped carrying a reporter's notebook when they sold the paper, but still tended to classify people according to whether he thought he could get a feature out of them. Old people were good bets because, even if they had nothing else to say, you could still get most of them to talk about the way things used to be. Old guys at fruit stands had been his secret weapon against slow news days.

Darryl pointed up into the fog. “Tell me about your sign,” he said.

“It's grandfathered in,” she said, “if that's what you're wondering about. You can't build them that high anymore. People have told me they've seen it from three miles out, but that's probably bullshit. I never went to look.”

The old man raised his arm.

“That one?” she asked, dipping a moth out of the water. “Oh, look at that. That's a big bastard.” She tapped the moth out on the gravel. “A few years ago some nice gay fellows tried to get it declared a national historic something-or-other, but nothing ever came of it. I think they liked it because it was pink.”

Darryl touched his back pocket again. He didn't have a newspaper to write for, or even a notebook to write in, but decided to go ahead and interview them anyway. He thought he'd been tired of the newspaper business when they sold the
Argus
—all those sordid AP stories about Clinton's sexual predilections, or the feature one of his young reporters brought him about an “authentic mountain dulcimer player” who actually had an MBA from the University of Miami—but now he knew better.

“Of course, the amazing thing about that sign,” the old woman continued, “is that none of the hurricanes ever broke the neon. We've never had to replace a single tube. We've replaced the roof four times and we've been flooded more times than I can count, but the damn glass never broke. We've been on several news shows about it.”

“That is amazing.”

“The gay fellows thought so. They have a bed and breakfast up the road in Kitty Hawk. It looks like a nice enough place, but I've never gone inside. We tried a continental breakfast for a while, but it was a pain in the ass. Every morning people cleaned us out and took all the food back to their rooms, even those tiny little boxes of cereal, so we said screw it.”

The old man slapped his hand once against the arm of his wheelchair, then pointed at the water. The old woman turned toward him and put her free hand on her hip before looking again at Darryl.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Are you planning on swimming in this pool tomorrow?”

“No, ma'am, I don't think so.”

“Then the hell with it. I'm not going to worry about it anymore.” She dropped the skimmer onto the sidewalk and turned to face the old man. “I said I'm not going to worry about it anymore.” She turned back to Darryl and pointed at two deck chairs. “You want to sit down?”

“Sure.”

“Jorge should've had the cover on by now, but he's a lazy prick.”

“Jorge?”

“Well, I shouldn't have said that. He's not really a lazy prick, I don't guess. He's married to Dolores. He works full time at the Holiday Inn and just moonlights over here. He still needs to get his ass over here and put the cover on, though. Remind me to get on Dolores about it tomorrow.”

The old man slowly raised his head and mumbled something.

“Listen at that. This one over here doesn't like Mexicans. He thinks they're taking over the world. Of course, I don't know if you've heard, but Nags Head is running out of Mexicans. I don't know where they all went. Some of the big places have started shipping in Russians. The Russians, though, will steal anything that ain't tied down.”

“Are you both from here?” Darryl asked.

“He's from Florida,” she said. “I grew up near Salvo. My granddad had a fishing pier. It's not there anymore. The Ash Wednesday storm took it off in sixty-two.”

“How did you meet?”

“He was in the Coast Guard during the war and it was his job to ride up and down the beach on a horse. The U-boats were bad, especially in forty-two, everything was blacked out—if you lit a lantern to go to the outhouse somebody would arrest you—and at night we used to sit in the dark on the end of Granddad's pier and watch the ships blow up. You'd see the flashes off in the distance, and then three or four seconds later you'd hear, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Next day we'd go up and down the beach to see what had washed up and this guy, him and his buddies would ride up and down on their horses and look it over and tell us whether or not we could keep it.”

“What was the best thing you ever found?”

“Spam. Oh my God, we thought that was a treasure.”

“Did any bodies ever wash up?”

“Oh, yes. That's how we met,” the old woman said. “Isn't that right?”

The old man grunted.

“Listen to him. He's still pissed off at the Germans. He's a Jew, so I guess he's got a point. I'm not a Jew, but his people weren't observant, so when we got married it didn't matter. I say if a German's check don't bounce, who gives a shit? What were we talking about?”

“How you met.”

“Oh, yeah. Dead bodies. So, anyway, one day I was on the beach with my little sister, probably hoping we'd find some more Spam, and we saw a body bobbing around out in the surf. Naked and that dead white, I don't know if you've ever seen that color. The fish and crabs had been at it, but we'd grown up around a pier and seen stuff like that. So we just squatted down and watched it because we didn't have anything else to do. You couldn't tell if it was German or American.”

She tilted her head at the old man.

“Just then he rode up on his horse, all handsome in his Smokey the Bear hat and told us to stay with the body until he got back. Well, pretty soon the tide started coming in and the body started to float away. I didn't want him to be mad at me when he got back, because I thought he was good-looking, so I waded in and grabbed it by the ankle, and every time a wave lifted it up I pulled it toward the beach. Eventually I got it far enough up on the sand that it wouldn't wash away. My sister just sat on her ass the whole time and didn't help me one bit. You couldn't make her touch a dead body, but she would gut a shark and not think anything of it. Now she lives in Phoenix.”

“How old were you?”

“Fourteen,” she said. “He came back with his buddies and a truck and talked to me and found out where I lived, and we started sneaking around together. I'd climb out the window. My folks didn't like it, but you put a teenage girl on an island with a bunch of Coast Guards and what do you think is going to happen? He said he would come back after the war and marry me, though, and he did. I'll give him that. His people had a motel in St. Petersburg, a big pink monstrosity called the Del Moroccan, and when we got married they set us up. He wanted to get out of Florida, be his own man, and I never really wanted to live on the mainland, so we came back to Nags Head. There wasn't much here then. We were the only brick motel on the island. The tall sign was his idea. I thought up Wade-n-Sea.”

The old man snorted through his nose.

“He wanted to call the place the Del Conquistador,” she said, “but I thought it sounded like somebody's name. Hey, look, everybody. It's Dale Conquistador. We were busy as we could be for a long time. Filled up all season. The same people came back every year. They would have kids and then their kids would grow up and have kids and the roof would blow off and we would put it back on and everybody would come back the next year.”

“It sounds like you've had a nice life,” Darryl said.

“You hear that?” the old woman said. “He says it sounds like we've had a nice life.”

The old man waved as if swatting away a slow-moving mosquito.

“This one here,” she said, “he always had to have a new Cadillac, and he always had to have a fast boat, and he always had to have some little waitress tramp of a girlfriend, and in the winter when we went to Florida he had to be a big shot at the track, throwing money around, leaving big tips.”

The old man raised his chin and gazed levelly at the old woman. Darryl couldn't read his expression.

“Big, shiny Cadillacs,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “He hates a Japanese car as bad as he hates a German. He thinks the Japanese are in cahoots with the Mexicans. Oh, and the Chinese. They're in on it now. Is your car Japanese?”

“Swedish,” Darryl said.

“You hear that? He says that car is Swedish.”

The old man lowered his head.

Darryl leaned toward the old woman. “If you don't mind my asking,” he said, “how did you two stay together?”

The old woman blinked at him and twisted slightly in her chair. He had asked the question he shouldn't have asked until the end of the interview. He was losing his touch.

“That's kind of a personal question,” she said. “What's the matter? You and your wife not getting along?”

“No, ma'am. Not really.”

“Well, since you're so damn curious, let me tell you the secret to a long marriage. If you want to stay together, then don't leave.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

The old man nodded.

She put her hands on her knees and stood up. “You hear that?” she said to him. “Tide's almost in.”

Darryl hadn't noticed the boom and shush of the surf until the old woman mentioned it. He wondered how that was possible. He turned and looked toward the wing of rooms barely visible between the parking lot and the ocean. “Wow,” he said. “That sounds close.”

“It is close,” she said. “We've lost four hundred feet of beach since we built the place. In the early years, when the tide was out it took forever to walk to the water. And now,” she said. “Well, now it's time for me and him to go inside and turn off all these damn lights.”

When Darryl walked by the wheelchair, the old man grabbed him by the wrist.

“Your car,” the old man rasped, “is shit.”

Darryl was sitting on the rear bumper of his car when the Wade-n-Sea sign blinked off, followed seconds later by the pool lights. The wing on the other side of the parking lot vanished into the fog, save for the indeterminate yellow glow of what Darryl knew to be the safety lights underneath the covered walkway. The darkened rooms fronting the sea disappeared entirely. Darryl walked around the car and placed his hand on the doorknob to their room, but he couldn't make himself go inside.

He followed the safety lights from his wing to the abandoned wing and then felt his way from door to door until he found the breezeway to the beach. He dragged his fingers along the rough brick wall of the tunnel as he moved unsteadily toward the pitch-black roar of the surf. When the wall ran out he stepped off the concrete walkway and pitched forward into the air. Before he had time to yell he landed face-first on wet sand and somersaulted onto his back. The warm froth of a dying wave immediately gurgled around him. He leapt to his feet and jerked his cell phone out of his pocket and held it over his head. It wasn't until the next wave slid up over his ankles that he lowered his arm. His neck hurt and his face felt scraped up. He placed his hand on his chest and checked the thrash of his heart for premonitory irregularities. When he opened his phone the illuminated screen seared an afterimage of levitating rectangles onto his retinas. Satisfied that he wasn't dying, Darryl clambered up the four feet of dune he had just tumbled down.