For days he felt the cold pursuit. Each time he turned to look there was a familiar sedan at his back. No lights, no emblem. The driver hidden by tinted glass. Once he saw a man and woman in uniform talking to the shopkeeper under whose eaves he had spent the night. But the shopkeeper knew nothing so the officers left and abandoned their chase. Still the cars were after him. Child Services. Police. Another youth for foster placement.
He started his camp in a thicket near a park on the bay. In the evenings he picked his way among the shadows and through the trashcans, where tourists and residents ditched the remnants of their picnic meals. But a few days of this was enough for him, and on a moonless night he slipped into the understory beside the highway and began moving south.
***
The next town was small, slow, and quiet. The skyline was bare and only steeples broke its plane. There was no traffic. The people were mostly older and paid little heed to William as he followed along the storefronts. He came to an alleyway behind a strip of restaurants where two older men sat on food crates. Cut jean shorts, yellowed tank tops. They looked up at him and then one of them waved him over. “Do you have a extra cigarette?” asked the man.
“No,” said William.
“Any chew?”
“No. No chew.
“Aw let him alone, will you? He aint old enough for that stuff.”
William looked from man to man. “You got any food?”
“Got this bread and these chips. It’ll hurts my gums so you can share it with Mitchell here.” William pulled a crate over from nearby and sat down next to them. The bread was hard and likely several days past old. He ate it feverishly. “You seem young to be alone,” said Nate. “You ought to go see about getting yourself off these streets. Where’s your father?” William unrolled the bag of potato chips and popped them into his mouth in stacks, stopping only to brush the crumbs from his shirt.
***
Nate and Mitchell were brothers. Twins, actually, fraternal twins born in that very town. They had with them a shaggy brown mutt named Alf which never barked but which cried endlessly if one of them drifted more than five feet away from him.
“What vessel was your father aboard?” Mitchell crunched and sucked at a mouthful of hard candies, a much larger portion than he should have taken in one try. “What vessel was he aboard when it was sunk?” A long string of drool fell from his lips and spiraled to the ground.
“Wasn’t aboard no vessel. Used to work a shrimp boat. But it never sank.”
“How’d he pass then?” Nate lifted his eyes from the newspaper he was studying, looking at ads for yard tools and window treatments. “How’d you come to be out here with no father and no mother?”
I just did is all. They both left. What’s for supper? Can we go walk somewheres?”
“Aint walkin time. It’s settin time,” said Mitchell. He drummed on the crate underneath him then spat a yellow pool of sugar on the blacktop. “Breakfast time in the morning. No walkin til then.”
***
In the morning, a Sunday morning, William and the brothers cut through town to get what Mitchell promised would be a free meal. They passed a large storefront bakery where a line of customers looked straight ahead and then down at the tickets in their hands as if they would win a prize when the clerk called their number. Beyond was a grass field beside a chapel. It had a longer line in front of it. “Them Methodists here make the best breads. Or the second best—the Mennonites can’t be beat when it comes to their baking. But still a close second—and loads cheaper than you’d find in the bakery!” Nate cackled and then grinned a wide and clumsy grin that showed his tongue between the missing pickets of his teeth. “The Methodists make the softest bread, you might say.” He laughed again.
A slow ribbon of hungry men dressed in mottled rags, coughing indiscriminately and stepping forward to fill the spaces as they opened up. There were perhaps a dozen women among them, tough to distinguish from the rest between the filth and the common malaise that sulked over everything. The churchgoers who worked the tables smiled as they handed out plates of food and little bags of soap and toothpaste and fresh socks. William was the youngest beneficiary, but then again his age didn’t matter because they were all as one, all of one creed and all the same rank because fate did not care whose fault their privation was.
They inched toward the aroma of biscuits and buns set on trays, cookies and rolls wrapped in paper for them to take. The little dog jingled behind them on a thin twine leash. When they had taken their shares of food they moved off. They sat on a bench beneath an oak tree and ate, Nate pulling off little pieces of bread and feeding the dog by hand.
***
Late in the day they were walking again. They wandered down a long sidewalk beneath the shade of royal palms, past a row of shops selling jewelry and beachwear and sunglasses. Small bistros and cafés. A cigar shop, a wine shop, a hair salon. The curbs were lined with new cars of makes that William had never seen, cars with silver hood ornaments and silver wheels, and when at last they rounded a bend into a neighborhood along the canal all the homes had private docks and views of the bay. Farther on they passed a marina where yachts sat in their slips for weeks at a time, sailboats with masts etched deep against the orange sky. The opera house where doors were opening for a matinee. Velvet ropes strung from brass stanchions. Men in vested suits taking tickets and ushering women in gowns and heels. Then they turned again down a long street and the smell of it reached them before sight or sound could find them on the wind.
A sprawling grass field where scores of makeshift structures housed the town’s other populace. Lean-tos made of tilted clapboard siding pilfered from demolition sites, tents and huts built of vinyl sheeting and sodden plywood. Each of them as stale and as feeble as gingerbread houses. The stench of hot urine everywhere. They tiptoed over human feces and weaved around empty aerosol spray cans while between them weaved stray dogs. They walked the bank of a scum-covered pond where a shopping cart was overturned and half sunk in the water. The fountain there had not worked in years. Next to a pile of rags on the far shore a figure shifted sluggishly beneath a greasy yellow blanket. Syringes and wine corks and wasted condoms. A man wearing dog tags in a wheelchair below a cabbage palm. Abandoned hosiery smeared with excrement. Men and women with canes and walkers, crumpled cellophane wrappers shifting and straightening where the breeze tugged the grass. A man whittling off shards of something and handing them to a woman who handed them to another man. Stray cats about. Thin folks with tan forearms and gray faces. Sitting cross legged on rugs or blankets like merchants without wares to peddle. Nameless, jobless. Some missing limbs. All of them tired or sick or both.
They approached a tent where a man sat drinking warm beer. He knew Nate and Mitchell and they joined him in drink while William held the little dog by the leash. All the while the mutt kept the rope tight as he tried to enter the tent, where the three men sat in their plastic sauna laughing and getting drunk. But soon the dog became tired and quit fussing, and then lay in the grass and went to sleep. William tied the leash to a tent pole and moved on without saying goodbye.
***
South, west. The gulf calls to him. A languid tide curling somewhere past the dunes, tangles of seagrape chattering in the breeze. William reached the sand before dusk but loitered in a park and waited for the final beachgoers to leave. Before long the sun had vanished and a few early stars began to blink. He scratched at the mosquitoes that woke in the twilight and he watched as the headlights of the last car disappeared from the lot.
Behind him the world was quieting for the night. In front of him and to right and left nothing stirred. He took off his shoes and his socks and tossed them to the sand behind him and felt his toes sink into the sand below. The waves climbing over them.
In the blackness he stripped of his clothes and threw them to the sand by his shoes. He tested the water to his shins and it was warm so he stepped farther out and sat down and let the waves brush his chest. The only sounds around him were those made by the sea. The night overhead blacker still.
A voice in the darkness. “Hey there friend! Always nice to have a little comp’ny in the bath, aint it?”
William froze. He turned his head and looked toward where the voice had come from but there was nothing to see. Just the pale clouds hung low across the sky. A white moon reigned over all of it, and then beneath that moon an enormous silhouette rose from its crouch in the shallow sea. Backlit and forging a shadow so long that it covered the boy. It dripped with sea and stood bare and broad and naked like a monolith. “Perfect night we got us here, huh friend? Perfect night for a bath.” The figure tilted its head and howled with laughter and then leaned forward and shook the water loose from its back like a dog.
***
It was a long walk from the beach to his camp, over the dunes and around knotted colonies of mangroves, across the road and through a wide scrub plain toward the forest. He said it was a nature preserve and that it rarely had visitors. William stood looking at the truck. The wheels had sunk two inches into the soft soil and the tires around them held no air. The paint was flaking and faded from the sun. Bird scat on the hood and in the bed, the passenger mirror cracked and the back window of the cab gone entirely. “Won’t be long fore I get her up and runnin again. Just need me a few tools is all.”
They made a small fire and the man produced a pack of sausage links with some buns and a jar of mustard. He kept it all in a cooler with ice. Afterward they put the leftover ice into cups and drank cold lemonade from a jug he had tucked beneath the bumper. They made small talk over the food and fire.
“I don’t get it, Amos. How was it that you come by these sausages?”
“Like I says, it’s all in the timing. Can’t pay if they aint no clerk at the counter!”
William chewed slowly and thought about this. “Where do you mean to drive when that truck of yours is movin again?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He looked deep into the fire. As if it held this and the answers to other questions. “Been in this spot so long I forgot where I was headed. Spark plugs, a crescent wrench to fit the battery connectors—and a pump for the tires. She’ll be good as new.” He turned his head toward the forest and let fly a belch so thunderous it seemed to shake the trees. “S’cuse me.”
“That’s a good lookin truck, anyway. Or it will be once it gets goin again.”
“Mm-hm.” He nodded. “Yep. Fine a truck as they make, anyway. What’s say we turn in? Tomorrow there’s meals aplenty for those who know how to find em.”
***
“Wait til he gets out past the breakers. Water’s still shallow there. These beaches is flat as could be. Watch. Watch. You seen it! Sits down just like that. Soakin up the sun. Not a care in the world.”
“I don’t get it. What’s happening, Amos?”
“Follow me.” Amos put on a headset with frayed wire and walked the sand carrying a broken vacuum shaft, at the bottom of which he had fastened the discoid base of a floor lamp. On the other end, just below where he gripped the handle, a portable radio was affixed to act as the battery. A cord ran the length of the device from handle to disc. “No one can tell if they aint lookin close.”
“Find anything good today?” asked a lady who was walking the sand with her husband.
“Oh yes, mam,” said Amos, “got me two quarter-dollars and a package of fishhooks!”
“Oh, how nice!” said the lady.
“Beep beep. Beep bop. Beep beep.” He waved the gadget back and forth over the sand as if sweeping a floor. Then he settled on a spot and instructed William to dig. “Hold it up,” he whispered, “hold it up high.”
William held a pebble to the sun, then turned and gawked at Amos.
“Wa-hoo!” said Amos. “Nother quarter-dollar here!”
They walked down the beach and stopped in the sand where the man in the water had laid his towel. Amos bent down and swung his head from side to side to see that no one was looking. He grabbed the man’s shoes and emptied them into a satchel he had hanging from his shoulder, a few items clunking into the bag along with a chute of crystal sand. He looked into the bag: a wristwatch, a ring of keys, a wallet. He put the shoes down and they made their way along, Amos tracing a pendulum with his contraption and stopping often for the boy to dig, plying through beach towels and cooler pockets where they were left unguarded by bathers in the sea. They worked the beach amid a chorus of beeps until they had collected over one hundred dollars in cash, three watches, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, and several keyrings from folks who would have trouble getting back to their hotel rooms that day.
***
One evening, after they had strolled up to the counter of an ice cream parlor and walked away with cones that were intended for someone else, they sat on a park bench and lapped at their dessert as the sky dimmed around them. “You know, never had me such a good father,” said Amos. He turned his wrist and kissed a drop of ice cream that had fallen on it. “Could be I was the problem, misbehavin and whatnot. I miss my mother, though. Miss her a whole lot.”
“I miss my mamma a whole lot.” Insects woke, calling from the grass, the trees.
“Aint easy bein out here with no mother and no father. But still they’re out there somewheres, for you and for me.”
“Do you think they can see us? My parents and yours?”
“Well, not like you mean. They can’t see us like I see you right here and now. But they sure can see us in their hearts and in their dreams. So they watch over us, sorta like them angels do in the clouds all day.”
“Would they be mad for the things we done?”
“Like the stealin and all? Heck no. They’d be right proud. A man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do to get by. Aint always easy, but it’s the right way to be. Only worry we got is the trouble of gettin caught. But if we’re real careful—and real lucky—it might never happen.”
“Aint enough trouble out there to scare me.”
“Amen, my brother. Amen. Wanna hear a song I wrote?”
***
They sat on the edge of a rockpile beside coconut palms and Amos showed William how to thread bits of mussel and shrimp onto a hook and catch sheepshead. “They got gnarly teeth these fish do. Watch the way you take the hook out.”
“If their teeth is so tough how come they aint bit through the line?”
“Beats me. Hell, maybe they aint smart enough to try. Cast over there, right under them mangrove roots.”
“Whoa! Got another one!”
“Mm-hm. That son of a bitch is pan-size, too!” He watched as William lifted it from the water and removed the hook. They stared after it as it swam off, carving a miniature wake in the surface. An osprey circled high overhead.
“The ocean is so big. Makes the land seem small.” He looked into the water and watched as a school of pinfish swam past. Then he looked over his shoulder at a heron fretting in the shallows.
“I know what you mean. The water will do that. But this aint even the ocean. It’s the gulf. The real ocean is twice the size. Maybe more.”
“Why is it the gulf and not the ocean?”
“Cause that’s the way God made it. Made the ocean big as the sky.”
“I want to see the real ocean. Can we go see it?”
“Maybe. If I can get me what all I need to fix the truck, then maybe. Say, what’s say we go get us some grub? I know a place the burgers practically grow on trees.”
“How can a burger grow on trees?”
“You know what I mean. Come on, two a them patties got our names wrote on em in mustard. And the fries are always crispy. And the milkshakes are so thick you need to eat em with a spoon. Jus wait til you try one.”
*****
John Saporito is the first-place winner of the League of Utah Writers 2019 writing contest. He was named a finalist for the Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and shortlisted in both the William Faulkner-William Wisdom creative writing contest and the Writers’ Workshop of Asheville memoirs contest. His work has been published in Bright Flash Literary Review, Woods Reader, and Coastal Angler Magazine. Visit him online at johnsaporito.com
