Heart of Palm (29 page)

“Will,” he said softly, and Will got it, finally, understood. He leaned his head against Dean’s shoulder for a moment and then stood up from the barstool. “I gotta go Dad,” he said. “I want to go slide.”

Dean narrowed his eyes and looked at Frank, shifted his gaze to Carson, and then shrugged his shoulders. “Go on then,” he said to Will. “Go on and hang out with your sisters. Go pick daisies or something.” He turned his back on them then, turned back to nurse his beer and stare at the wood grain on the bar, his back hunched and his shoulders drawn up near his ears in defeat.

“Good night, boys,” Tommy Bolla called. “Happy Fourth!”

Outside the restaurant Will is buoyant, giddy. He races ahead of them to the truck, pounds on the roof while waiting for Carson and Frank to approach.

“Get off my truck, you punk,” Carson says, and he unlocks the door, climbs into the driver’s seat. Will and Frank sit next to him across the bench seat and they drive away from Uncle Henry’s, away from Dean, through the dampness of the woods of Utina and eastward toward the ocean. It is seven miles to Ponte Vedra Beach and they make it in ten minutes flat, Carson’s fastest yet, an astonishing feat given the width of County Road 25 and the tightness of the turns coming out of Utina and past Donner’s Landing. Halfway there, the bottle of Crown comes out from under the seat and they pass it among them, and in the moonlight Frank watches Will’s lips clench around the bottle, watches how he closes his eyes like a masochist to brace against the alcohol as it hits his throat. It is as if those two beers Dean has given him have simply primed a pump, awakened a thirst Will hadn’t even known he had.

At the dunes, Mac is waiting with his brother George and Tip Breen. Mac has a girl, a quiet thing named Kelly that Frank remembers from history class, and she’s looking spacey and confused, leaning against Mac as if she might fall, and the air is pricked with the faint smell of weed. The girl has long brown hair that hangs in limp sheets around her shoulders, a weak chin, big breasts. She does not smile. George and Tip are smoking cigarettes, sitting on the hood of Mac’s car.

The dunes are off A1A, down a small beach access road and hidden from view by a thick stretch of woodland—live oaks and sweet gum, pines and cypress. The sand is packed solid here, drivable, though they’ve learned to travel with a shovel in the bed of the truck, learned how to dig out the back tires of a vehicle stuck on the beach, create traction, get moving again. They are bound by nothing; they are immortal. There is nothing they can’t do.

“You brought the hood?” Mac says, his arm hooked around the girl’s neck, and Carson points into the back of his pickup, where the detached car hood rests atop a pile of thick rope. George and Tip slide off Mac’s car and pull the flat piece of steel from the bed of Carson’s truck. They work fast, loud, cursing and laughing at each other and passing the bottle of Crown and smoking a joint down to the wet roach while they rig the car hood behind the truck, position it before a long range of sandy yellow dunes spotted here and there with palmettos and sea grape, oaks draped with thick Spanish moss that looks like ghosts in the trees.

Will has had more to drink tonight than ever in his life. He is punchy, foolish now, loud and obnoxious and rude.

“I’m first,” he says. “I’m fucking first,” and Frank takes the bottle of Crown from him, passes it on to George.

“Slow down,” Frank says to Will. “You’re acting like an idiot.”

“Fuck you,” Will says, and he takes a warm beer from beneath the seat of Carson’s truck, opens it, slams it down his throat. He gets sloppy toward the end, chokes, spits a sheet of foam out over the sand, then giggles frantically, childishly, runs toward a low-hanging oak branch and starts doing pull-ups. Kelly watches blankly. Frank’s own vision has begun to blur a bit, and his tongue feels thick and clumsy. An owl cries in a thatch of sweet gums.

“You’re in my English class,” Kelly says.

“History,” Frank says.

“Oh,” she says, and she stares at him, and Frank thinks she does not believe him but he does not know how to convince her. Mac has his arm around her and he’s feeling her stomach under her shirt but she still looks at Frank, detached, confused, quiet again.

“What good students you are,” Mac says, laughing. “Good stuff,” he says.

Carson gets into his truck. “Let’s do this,” he says, and Tip climbs onto the detached car hood, grips the ropes in his hands.

“I said I’m first,” Will says, and he rushes forward and tries to push Tip off the hood, and Frank pulls him back. “Shut up, Will,” he says, and Will looks at him, hurt. Why did they bring him? He’s too young, Frank thinks, we shouldn’t have brought him.

They slide for more than an hour, taking turns on the car hood, taking turns behind the wheel of the truck, taking turns with the bottle of Crown. The girl, Kelly, does not slide. She sits on a towel on a clear patch of sand and watches, stoic, quiet, unmoving. Mac comes over now and then to touch her, kiss her, put his hands down the back pockets of her jeans, but then his turn comes again and he whoops and dances over to the car hood and he slides, they all slide, Tip and Carson and Frank and Will and George and Mac, lit up like firecrackers and soaring over the dunes in a rush of wind and sand and booze. All the world is flying by in a jet stream and they are on fire and they are alive and they are in danger but they don’t care because they are airborne and nobody can touch them here in this nova, this supernova, nobody.

On the last run Carson is driving and Tip is sliding again. Carson pulls a doughnut that whips the car hood around in a tight circle. They all cheer until the edge of the car hood catches on a flat divot of sand and the hood tips up and over, hydroplaning, dumping Tip out onto the dune and then cartwheeling, a perfect square of heavy rusted metal, dancing lively across the sand and over to catch Kelly just behind the shoulder while she is up and scrambling and trying to get away. It brings her down and Frank is sick when he hears the noise, the blunt brutal sound of iron on bone.

The girl keens loudly for a moment and then stops, and the silence is frightening. Carson parks the truck and they all run to Kelly, but Frank is afraid to look. Tip is still struggling to his feet, shaking sand from his shirt and pants. Mac is ashen in the moonlight, and he leans over Kelly, calling her name again, again, again. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, oh sweet holy fuck, Kelly, he says. Her eyes are open and she stares at him, her lips parted, but she says nothing. The blood has begun to clot the sand under her shoulder. Frank is frozen, and Will has begun to gasp, to sob. Tip puts his arm around Will, steadies him.

“Get her to the hospital,” Carson says, and they pick her up and slide her into the backseat of Mac’s car and Mac sits back there with her. George drives, Tip sitting in the front seat, and they leave, headed south to St. Augustine. Now Carson and Will and Frank are there together, alone, and Frank tries not to look at the dark stain in the sand, the white mask of fear on Carson’s face. The night is suddenly silent.

“It’s our fault,” Will says.

“It was an accident,” Carson says. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Is she going to die?” Will says.

“Shut up,” Carson says.

Will starts to cry, and Carson throws the empty bottle of Crown into the scrub.

“Shut up, you fucking pussy,” he says. “My God, do you ever shut up?”

But Will cannot stop. He is young and he is drunk and he cannot stop crying and he puts his head down between his knees and coughs and sobs and then he wrings his hands and looks up at them.

“She’s going to die,” he wails.

Carson walks over to Will and shoves him.

“I told you to shut up,” he says. “Now let’s go.”

Will falls back in the sand and curls up in a fetal position and continues to weep, rocking back and forth with his arms around his knees. He is so drunk that he cannot stop. Frank has been this drunk before himself—once—and he remembers the idiocy of it, the abandon, the surrender, but he has no tolerance for it tonight.

“We need to stay here, in case they come back,” Will says.

“They’re not coming back. They went to the hospital,” Frank says.

“I’m staying here,” Will says.

“We’re leaving,” Carson says. “Get in the truck.”

Will stays in the sand, and then Carson grabs him by the arm, but Will shakes him off, his limbs long and jerky and his body taut with the alcohol and the adrenaline and the fear. Even Frank is angry now, angry at Will, such a baby, such a mama’s boy, Daddy’s boy, weeping for a girl he doesn’t even know.

“Leave him,” Frank says to Carson. “Let him walk.”

It’s seven miles back to Aberdeen from the beach and Frank has walked it before. It’s two hours on foot, the long road through the trees, and it’s no fun but it’s not impossible. The image of Kelly on the wet sand is overbearing, and the stain is still there before them, and suddenly Frank cannot be near Will, crying and snuffling and afraid, one minute longer. Serve him right. Serve them all right. You wanna be Daddy’s boy, Will? Chip off the old block? How’s that working for you, dumb-ass?

“Leave him,” he says again. “He can make it home.”

“Should we?” Carson says.

“Yeah.”

Carson looks at Frank, and then he nods and they get into the truck. They leave Will behind in the dunes, weeping on the sand, his arms wrapped tight around his knees. He turns his face up to watch the truck pull away, and Frank looks in the mirror outside his window and sees him in the moonlight, alone, uncertain. As the truck turns the corner he sees Will get up and slowly begin to walk, and then run toward the receding truck, and he hears him shout once—“Wait!—Frank! Don’t leave me!” and then, as the trees close in around the darkness, Carson drives them away and Will is gone.

“Are we going to the hospital?” Frank says to Carson.

“Maybe we should,” Carson says.

“You think she’s going to die?”

“Shit,” Carson says, and he shakes his head and doesn’t say any more.

But they don’t go to the hospital. They go home and sit outside Aberdeen on the concrete picnic table, drinking the last of the beers. Arla and Sofia are asleep; it is after midnight, and Dean is not yet home. After a while Carson goes quietly to the kitchen and calls the hospital. The girl is not dead. He talks to Mac; Kelly is conscious and crying and she is in great pain, but she is not dead and her parents are there and she is not going to die. Carson comes back to the picnic table and slaps Frank on the back and tells him what Mac said, and they grin at each other and then they stop. Frank is weak with relief and alcohol and the shame of hurting Kelly, but he is happy to be here with Carson, who is strong enough, he sometimes thinks, for all of them.

“We better go get that little shit,” Frank says. “He’s been walking long enough.”

They walk back to the truck, but before Carson turns the key in the ignition they hear it, and they turn their heads to the road, where in the distance the long slow whine of an ambulance’s siren has begun to slice through the night. Frank thinks of Will, and he looks at Carson, and a terrible knowledge passes between them, binds them for an instant more tightly than they have ever been bound before and then splits them like fission, their atoms spinning apart, away, out of control and into the universe forever.

“All right, now, Frank,” George said. He held the front door of the restaurant open, and as the coolness of the air-conditioned interior greeted them Frank felt himself jerked back to the present, jerked back to the moment, Carson on his way to Aberdeen with Bell’s bed and George Weeden rambling on about God-knows-what as they made their way across the dining room of Uncle Henry’s.

“Let me tell you all about this new venture of mine. Gonna change your life, friend,” George said.

“I gotta cook, George. And tend the bar.” Frank was exhausted, suddenly, bone weary, and still staring down Friday night, one of the busiest nights of the week. He walked behind the bar and slipped a clean apron over his shirt. He glanced into the kitchen. Morgan was firing up the second grill.

“Lemme just talk to you while you’re working, Frank,” George said. “Oh, and I’ll take a Mich.” Frank pulled the Michelob tap and filled a pint glass, set it on the bar in front of George.

“Okay,” George said. “Now, I’ve got three words for you, Bravo. You ready? ‘Whole. Life. Insurance.’” And then George Weeden was off—prattling away about cash value and fixed premiums and blah, blah, blah, Jesus Christ, Frank thought, was there any end of people giving him shit today?

As if on cue, the front door opened again, and Officer Donald Keith walked into Uncle Henry’s, a thick stack of campaign signs under his arm.

“Bravo,” Keith said. Frank hadn’t seen the cop in months, not since the last time Keith had come banging into the restaurant late on a Friday night to throw his weight around and create a ruckus, ostensibly looking for underage drinkers but really just bored and looking to pick at a decades-old scab of animosity. Keith had never gotten over the Easter Parade caper, especially since he’d never been able to pin any charge on the boys for the deed. After all, it’s hard to dust an alligator for fingerprints. And though Will had been gone and Frank had been significantly subdued for more than two decades now, Keith still took opportunities where he could to stir the pot. He seemed to think the war was still on. Frank couldn’t care less. Although he couldn’t resist, today, peevish as he was feeling, greeting the cop with his old, unsolicited nickname.