The Second Mate |
Issue 13
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Like some boyhood game of hopscotch, two young men in tuxedos toe the flagstones across the soggy sod of the garden villas until reaching a pair of high-rise hotels divided by a boardwalk, where they bow their heads against a coastal wind and set their sights not on the horizon but on the beetle black rental shoes that seem so out of place here, in a world of peeling pastels. Nestled between those mauve hotels is The Second Mate, a galleon-themed oyster bar serving fresh fish alfresco three of four seasons. It stays afloat throughout the offseason, but the fish tastes tougher for having been frozen. Two stone seahorses, a stud and a mare, guard the entrance where kids can climb a kitschy fishnet to board the boat. Whenever The Second Mate is reserved for a reception, the stud sports a bowtie, the mare a veil.
Were it summer, the wedding guests would have arrived at sunset in loose linen. They would have tipped the valet then left their wallets in their cars, never expecting a cash bar. The lobby would have felt cool compared to the salty subtropical air, though when they checked out at the end of the weekend with new freckles and thinner blood, the lobby would have felt more like a meat locker. But it isn’t that time of year. It’s the time of year when no one comes but the snowbirds that stay indoors when they aren’t combing the beach with metal detectors. The time of year when The Second Mate regrets to serve frozen fish. The time of year when the rooms are half off, which means the wedding guests can drink twice as much. Reaching the end of the boardwalk, the men step out of their shoes and lodge their shapeless socks in them like hermit crabs in empty whelk shells. They roll up their pantlegs to walk the lunula of the Gulf, passing a pop-up gazebo with ten white chairs, just enough for the wedding party: three bridesmaids, as many groomsmen, and both sets of parents. As with any destination wedding, this one will be ‘intimate,’ according to the evite. Though the groom’s dad had offered to host something grander, the father of the bride had declined on principle. “I rented a car,” says the best man, who’s heavier set and rougher hewn than the groom, skin lighter, teeth darker. “I left it with the valet, just in case.” “In case of what?” “It’s a Miata.” “A two-seater?” “You and me.” The best man elbows the groom, but the groom isn’t up for horseplay. “In case you get cold feet.” As they trudge onward, the groom is in fact looking at his feet, feet that are in fact cold, his toes curled and gray, ten raw shrimp. “I’m getting married tonight,” he declares. “It’ll be me and her in a getaway car. Dad lent us the Jag. We’re tying beer cans to it, so save your empties.” “Maybe a convertible was a bad choice,” says the best man. “I didn’t expect it to be so cold.” None of them had expected it to be so cold. When they thought of Florida, they thought of white sand and sunshine, bikinis and boogie boards, daiquiris with spiral straws and crop dusters skywriting vaporous love letters with ads streaming from the tail wing: happy hour, two for one, all you can eat. When they thought of Florida, they thought of ice cream and snow cones and airbrushed t-shirts from souvenir shops. They thought of theme parks with go-carts and miniature golf. But all these places are closed now, with the exception of the real golf courses where the fairways aren’t so fair and the greens are yellow. Other than golf there isn’t much to do but drink and play bingo with old folks who don’t drink anymore but buy rounds in remembrance of their own reckless youths, twirling a finger at the purblind bartender, Portis, who sweeps up the windfall of cash before feeling around for the taps beneath a sign that reads: The Early Bird Gets the Mezcal, The Night Owl Gets the Worm. Given his longtime vocation, Portis considers it perfectly normal to drink from dawn till dusk or dusk till dawn, but never both or you might get sea legs. That’s what he calls getting drunk. From the breast pocket of his tuxedo jacket, the groom draws a monogrammed flask. Spying that fishlike flash of silver, the best man beckons. They walk into a wall of wind, hugging themselves and sharing the nipple. This is nothing new. Ever since they met freshman year, they’ve shared it all. Secrets, clothes, double dates. The best man steps ahead to negotiate a briny puddle, and the groom falls behind, his voice lost to the wind. “We’d better turn around.” “Come again,” says the best man. “The tide’s going out, but the clouds are coming in. Looks like it may rain again.” They do a one-eighty and retrace their steps, surprised by how far they have come. They wait until the twin hotels are again full-size before veering inland through the beach club’s thatched umbrellas that are clenched like withered flowers. With the wind at their backs, they can hear each other again and walk without feeling as though they’re climbing a hill. “There’s something I’ve got to say.” The best man stops at the last of the duckboards leading back to the resort. He picks up and claps his shoes to rid them of sand fleas. Before he can find the words, the maid-of-honor "yoohoos” from the other end of the boardwalk, the wind making a tumbleweed of her hair despite combing a perfect part in the sea oats. “Must be time to start,” says the groom. “I’ll catch up,” says the best man. “But don’t you go and look at the bride.” “Why’s that?” The groom is backpedaling now, facing forward yet moving away. “Bad luck.” The best man drags a palm frond to the high tide line and sits down to stare out at the offing until he’s ready to edit his speech. |
Yance Wyatt is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee whose work has appeared in Grain, Los Angeles Review, The Normal School, The Pinch, and Zyzzyva. He teaches at the University of Southern California, where he formerly served as director of the Writing Center. His debut novel The Watersmith is forthcoming from Regal House Press, and his novella Camp is forthcoming from Running Wild Press.
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* * *
The groom misses his chance to carry his bride across the threshold. Swiping the keycard like his Visa, she enters the suite under her own power and stomps down a trail of rose petals to fling herself onto the canopy bed where the turndown service has made origami of a spare towel. She strangles the neck of that terrycloth swan.
“He ruined it! He ruined everything!”
“Nothing is ruined. We have the rest of the night. We have the rest of our lives.”
“Why would he wait until now?”
“He didn’t mean it. He was drunk. Sea legs.”
The groom gathers her hands and repeats his vows, only this time she’s already wearing the wedding band. “And forsaking all others,” he says, “keep thee only unto her.”
She smiles, however fleetingly, to reward him for saying the right thing. “Be honest. Has anything ever happened between you two?”
He drops her hands. “You would ask me that?”
“Tell me I’m not just a beard for a mayor’s son. Farmer’s daughter. Salt of the earth.”
“You think I’m hiding behind you and your family? How about you hiding behind mine? When we met your entire wardrobe was from The Gap. Now you’re in Vera Wang. Un-fucking-believable.” He tears the tie from his neck.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You don’t have to answer that question. I believe you.” She comes to kiss him, but now he is cold. She unlaces the bodice of her dress and leaves the ivory husk on the floor. It stands upright and empty, a ghost maiden. “Take me. I’m yours.”
He tries to take her but he can’t.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you thinking of him?”
“Of course I am.” The groom zips himself up. “How could I think of anything else? You wouldn’t let it go.”
She buries her head beneath a pillow. He can’t bear to hear her whimpering, so he unsheathes a victory cigar left over from the groomsmen’s giftbags and steps out onto the balcony. He pats himself down. No lighter. He digs through her purse. No luck. He calls reception. No answer. He fetches a sweaty bottle of champagne from an ice bucket of tepid water, thumbing at the cork until it shoots into the night, landing who knows where. He can hear the ocean but he cannot see it. He can’t see anything save for the lagoon-shaped infinity pool and staged shipwreck beside it where a candle dances on each of the picnic tables still occupied. He slides the cigar back into its tube. He won’t go that far for a light.
“He ruined it! He ruined everything!”
“Nothing is ruined. We have the rest of the night. We have the rest of our lives.”
“Why would he wait until now?”
“He didn’t mean it. He was drunk. Sea legs.”
The groom gathers her hands and repeats his vows, only this time she’s already wearing the wedding band. “And forsaking all others,” he says, “keep thee only unto her.”
She smiles, however fleetingly, to reward him for saying the right thing. “Be honest. Has anything ever happened between you two?”
He drops her hands. “You would ask me that?”
“Tell me I’m not just a beard for a mayor’s son. Farmer’s daughter. Salt of the earth.”
“You think I’m hiding behind you and your family? How about you hiding behind mine? When we met your entire wardrobe was from The Gap. Now you’re in Vera Wang. Un-fucking-believable.” He tears the tie from his neck.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You don’t have to answer that question. I believe you.” She comes to kiss him, but now he is cold. She unlaces the bodice of her dress and leaves the ivory husk on the floor. It stands upright and empty, a ghost maiden. “Take me. I’m yours.”
He tries to take her but he can’t.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you thinking of him?”
“Of course I am.” The groom zips himself up. “How could I think of anything else? You wouldn’t let it go.”
She buries her head beneath a pillow. He can’t bear to hear her whimpering, so he unsheathes a victory cigar left over from the groomsmen’s giftbags and steps out onto the balcony. He pats himself down. No lighter. He digs through her purse. No luck. He calls reception. No answer. He fetches a sweaty bottle of champagne from an ice bucket of tepid water, thumbing at the cork until it shoots into the night, landing who knows where. He can hear the ocean but he cannot see it. He can’t see anything save for the lagoon-shaped infinity pool and staged shipwreck beside it where a candle dances on each of the picnic tables still occupied. He slides the cigar back into its tube. He won’t go that far for a light.
* * *
A teen with a wispy mustache and red windbreaker dangles the last keyring before the receptionist, who stands behind a sandstone counter under a petrified swordfish. The other valets are long gone.
“Uno más.”
“There’s always one more, isn’t there?” The receptionist drops the fob into a small envelope and on it writes Miata. “Go home, amigo. Any guest who stays this late won’t be able to drive.”
But the valet doesn’t go home. He sneaks aboard The Second Mate thanks to the horny diversion of Circadian Rhythm. Two of three bandmembers are still onstage, flanking a microphone craned over a pair of congas. One blows a trumpet, the other a trombone, both with ropy hair bundled up in rasta hats. They are improvising while the drummer takes a leak, more and more often these days with his prostate shrunken and his kidneys collecting stones.
The patrons are past the point of eating. They’re strictly drinking now. No longer do the ‘deckhands’ serve oysters on the half shell or peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches from a pun-filled kids’ menu. Instead of battering the shrimp with it, they are serving the beer outright, along with enough of rum and tequila to float a boat. If someone goes overboard tonight, it won’t be the first time. Many a patron has dropped the fifteen feet into that lagoon-shaped infinity pool, be it on accident or on a dare.
Bringing a conch to his lips and blowing louder than the two-man horn section, Portis invites the blitz of last call. He sniffs the mouth of two separate bottles before pouring a shot of something or another for a couple of game groomsmen, and when a pregnant bridesmaid orders a virgin daquiri, he says something untoward that makes her laugh, his vulgarity endearing him to the women without offending their men, probably because the poor guy can’t see the women he’s wooing. Taking a teetering tray of tumblers from Portis, the cocktail waitress ignores a number of paying customers in favor of a familiar face. The valet isn’t what she would call a friend, but he’s a coworker, nonetheless.
“Dos Dos Equis, por favor. And no, I didn’t stutter. I want two of them.”
“I’m telling you, if he sees me slipping you drinks again, he’ll fire us.”
“He doesn’t see anything. He smells it.”
Laying a breath strip on his tongue like a hit of acid, the valet jerks his head at Portis, who’s overflowing a draft beer while nodding along to a Harry Belafonte cover. He wears an eyepatch over one eye, though he might as well wear them over both. The valet unzips his windbreaker and shakes himself like a wet dog; it had rained earlier. He runs a fingertip across the cusswords and lanced hearts carved into the picnic table. Canons line either side of the ship. They’re actually telescopes tourists can activate with a quarter. He slides in a coin and looks through one but sees no stars and can’t say whether or not it will rain again. It’s one of those nights, just as today was one of those days. The flag of the mainmast is red. Most days it’s yellow or green. Today there’d been an undertow.
Portis hands Grover that brimming lager, half of it head, and Grover retakes the stage for an encore. He taps on the mic to feel the feedback in his fingers. If you look past Portis’s eyepatch and Grover’s perennial shades, Portis’s braided goatee and Grover’s cotton candy beard, you can see the resemblance. Even if circumstance sculpted them differently as it does dunes, they’re still identical twins. As he arranges himself on the stool before the congas, Grover spots the valet, but the valet knows Grover won’t say a word about him drinking. Grover can’t say a word. Can’t hear one either. Grover can’t hear or say anything, which eliminates the threat of hearsay.
The cocktail waitress works her way back to the bar collecting glassware of all shapes and sizes. She puts in the order for the Dos Equis, but Portis won’t fill it. “This for the valet or the best man?”
“The best man,” she lies.
“You do get that a valet’s a DD, by definition?” The cocktail waitress doesn’t hem and haw, so Portis takes her word for it. “Grab your tips from the jar and leave the best man to me.”
The song ends and the place clears out. Grover packs up his drumkit and Portis puts on a pot of coffee. Eventually the Bunn-O-Matic quits its gastric rumbling and Portis unfolds his guide cane to tap his way toward the best man with a steaming mug in hand. Though the best man lifts his drowsy head to drink what’s put before him, he flinches at the bitterness or the heat.
“Night, Grover,” Portis calls over his shoulder as his brother crawls into a hammock that’s intertwined with the rigging.
“He didn’t hear you,” slurs the best man.
“No shit,” says Portis. “He’s deaf. Lost his ears in ’73. Same year I lost my eyes.”
“A blind bartender and a deaf drummer. Who’s the waitress? Helen Keller? Sorry.” The best man burps into the sphincter of his fist. “Bad joke.”
“Wouldn’t be sorry if I was you. I’d be skinny-dipping with them bridesmaids.”
“Meh,” says the best man. “Rather keep drinking.”
“You already ran up a doozy of a tab. What say you lend me a hand and work it off? The booze and the bill.” The best man lets Portis lead him to the galley then removes his cufflinks and rolls up his sleeves. “Wouldn’t kill you to say something, sailor,” Portis proposes after five full minutes of handwashing wineglasses. “If you got a bad taste in your mouth, try chewing the fat.”
“Don’t know what to say.”
“Then make something up.”
“Don’t know any stories.”
“Everybody’s got a story. Telling it the first time’s the hard part. Gets easier after that. And better with age, like red, red wine.” Portis croons that last bit in homage to Circadian Rhythm.
“I think I’ve said enough for one night.”
“I don’t know. The night’s still young.” This is Portis chumming the water. He has a knack for luring patrons into an exchange that will end with them spilling their guts. Fisherman and fish.
“Uno más.”
“There’s always one more, isn’t there?” The receptionist drops the fob into a small envelope and on it writes Miata. “Go home, amigo. Any guest who stays this late won’t be able to drive.”
But the valet doesn’t go home. He sneaks aboard The Second Mate thanks to the horny diversion of Circadian Rhythm. Two of three bandmembers are still onstage, flanking a microphone craned over a pair of congas. One blows a trumpet, the other a trombone, both with ropy hair bundled up in rasta hats. They are improvising while the drummer takes a leak, more and more often these days with his prostate shrunken and his kidneys collecting stones.
The patrons are past the point of eating. They’re strictly drinking now. No longer do the ‘deckhands’ serve oysters on the half shell or peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches from a pun-filled kids’ menu. Instead of battering the shrimp with it, they are serving the beer outright, along with enough of rum and tequila to float a boat. If someone goes overboard tonight, it won’t be the first time. Many a patron has dropped the fifteen feet into that lagoon-shaped infinity pool, be it on accident or on a dare.
Bringing a conch to his lips and blowing louder than the two-man horn section, Portis invites the blitz of last call. He sniffs the mouth of two separate bottles before pouring a shot of something or another for a couple of game groomsmen, and when a pregnant bridesmaid orders a virgin daquiri, he says something untoward that makes her laugh, his vulgarity endearing him to the women without offending their men, probably because the poor guy can’t see the women he’s wooing. Taking a teetering tray of tumblers from Portis, the cocktail waitress ignores a number of paying customers in favor of a familiar face. The valet isn’t what she would call a friend, but he’s a coworker, nonetheless.
“Dos Dos Equis, por favor. And no, I didn’t stutter. I want two of them.”
“I’m telling you, if he sees me slipping you drinks again, he’ll fire us.”
“He doesn’t see anything. He smells it.”
Laying a breath strip on his tongue like a hit of acid, the valet jerks his head at Portis, who’s overflowing a draft beer while nodding along to a Harry Belafonte cover. He wears an eyepatch over one eye, though he might as well wear them over both. The valet unzips his windbreaker and shakes himself like a wet dog; it had rained earlier. He runs a fingertip across the cusswords and lanced hearts carved into the picnic table. Canons line either side of the ship. They’re actually telescopes tourists can activate with a quarter. He slides in a coin and looks through one but sees no stars and can’t say whether or not it will rain again. It’s one of those nights, just as today was one of those days. The flag of the mainmast is red. Most days it’s yellow or green. Today there’d been an undertow.
Portis hands Grover that brimming lager, half of it head, and Grover retakes the stage for an encore. He taps on the mic to feel the feedback in his fingers. If you look past Portis’s eyepatch and Grover’s perennial shades, Portis’s braided goatee and Grover’s cotton candy beard, you can see the resemblance. Even if circumstance sculpted them differently as it does dunes, they’re still identical twins. As he arranges himself on the stool before the congas, Grover spots the valet, but the valet knows Grover won’t say a word about him drinking. Grover can’t say a word. Can’t hear one either. Grover can’t hear or say anything, which eliminates the threat of hearsay.
The cocktail waitress works her way back to the bar collecting glassware of all shapes and sizes. She puts in the order for the Dos Equis, but Portis won’t fill it. “This for the valet or the best man?”
“The best man,” she lies.
“You do get that a valet’s a DD, by definition?” The cocktail waitress doesn’t hem and haw, so Portis takes her word for it. “Grab your tips from the jar and leave the best man to me.”
The song ends and the place clears out. Grover packs up his drumkit and Portis puts on a pot of coffee. Eventually the Bunn-O-Matic quits its gastric rumbling and Portis unfolds his guide cane to tap his way toward the best man with a steaming mug in hand. Though the best man lifts his drowsy head to drink what’s put before him, he flinches at the bitterness or the heat.
“Night, Grover,” Portis calls over his shoulder as his brother crawls into a hammock that’s intertwined with the rigging.
“He didn’t hear you,” slurs the best man.
“No shit,” says Portis. “He’s deaf. Lost his ears in ’73. Same year I lost my eyes.”
“A blind bartender and a deaf drummer. Who’s the waitress? Helen Keller? Sorry.” The best man burps into the sphincter of his fist. “Bad joke.”
“Wouldn’t be sorry if I was you. I’d be skinny-dipping with them bridesmaids.”
“Meh,” says the best man. “Rather keep drinking.”
“You already ran up a doozy of a tab. What say you lend me a hand and work it off? The booze and the bill.” The best man lets Portis lead him to the galley then removes his cufflinks and rolls up his sleeves. “Wouldn’t kill you to say something, sailor,” Portis proposes after five full minutes of handwashing wineglasses. “If you got a bad taste in your mouth, try chewing the fat.”
“Don’t know what to say.”
“Then make something up.”
“Don’t know any stories.”
“Everybody’s got a story. Telling it the first time’s the hard part. Gets easier after that. And better with age, like red, red wine.” Portis croons that last bit in homage to Circadian Rhythm.
“I think I’ve said enough for one night.”
“I don’t know. The night’s still young.” This is Portis chumming the water. He has a knack for luring patrons into an exchange that will end with them spilling their guts. Fisherman and fish.
* * *
The groom doesn’t even try to sleep. He sits out on the balcony listening to the petulant push and pull of the sea. At some point he realizes there will be no sunrise. The sky simply turns from black to gray, and the water turns gray with the sky. Normally he goes to sleep and wakes up and everything looks different. Not just brighter, but more honest and optimistic. This time, though, he has seen the night through, and nothing has changed but the date. He didn’t feel a difference between boy and man at eighteen, and he doesn’t feel a difference in single and married today. He leaves the balcony through a flutter of curtains and stands beside the canopy bed looking down on her. Her pixie cut. Her slack jaw. The way she snores.
“Unladylike,” he whispers.
Moving catlike through the room on the pads of his feet, he gathers his things then zips his suitcase one tooth at a time. If he leaves quickly, quietly, maybe he can outrun the fallout, hop into a getaway car and drive into the sunset, so to speak. He stops short of the door, glancing over his shoulder long enough to take a mental picture. With the knob in hand he allows himself the moment of foresight that will bring him to his knees. He imagines her stirring as she does each morning, in a state of graceful disarray. Snapping her toes, arching her spine, yawning with stale morning breath. Then she’ll roll over and reach for him without so much as opening her eyes, the very definition of trust.
The groom stands the suitcase upright and leans his back against the door, sliding down.
“Unladylike,” he whispers.
Moving catlike through the room on the pads of his feet, he gathers his things then zips his suitcase one tooth at a time. If he leaves quickly, quietly, maybe he can outrun the fallout, hop into a getaway car and drive into the sunset, so to speak. He stops short of the door, glancing over his shoulder long enough to take a mental picture. With the knob in hand he allows himself the moment of foresight that will bring him to his knees. He imagines her stirring as she does each morning, in a state of graceful disarray. Snapping her toes, arching her spine, yawning with stale morning breath. Then she’ll roll over and reach for him without so much as opening her eyes, the very definition of trust.
The groom stands the suitcase upright and leans his back against the door, sliding down.
* * *
Portis and the best man are still handwashing wineglasses. “Let me guess. You went and fell for the wrong person. Well, sailor, you aren’t the first to make that mistake.” Portis peers dimly at Grover, now sound asleep in his hammock. “Me and him enlisted in the Coast Guard before the Army could draft us, but when they ran low on men, they sent us overseas anyhow. On the eve of our departure, we got hitched to our girlfriends in a joint ceremony. As a wedding gift they went in together on a raft, the mouthblown kind you’d see in a public pool. Me and Grover got a kick out of that, them thinking a man could survive at sea in a rubber ducky. Silly as it sounds, we packed that raft for the memory.”
“That’s not silly,” says the best man. “It had, like, sentimental value.”
“I’ll never forget the day we shipped out to Da Nang. The day I had my first taste of alcohol. Grover too. Made a toast at a portside tavern then boarded a destroyer big as Moby damn Dick. Me and him stood on the poop deck in uniform, and our wives jogged along the pier crying ‘Bon voyage.’ Mine was still in her nightgown and slippers. Grover’s wore velvet gloves and waved like a debutante. Her hair looked like a beehive but smelled like aerosol, not honey.”
“Sounds like you slept with her?”
“I slept with Grover. Which was a bad idea. ’Cause when the captain cut the lights, we’d fight over the bottom bunk the way we had as boys, seeing how bad the top bunk swayed and creaked. We nearly killed each other every day, but in the end we saved each other’s lives. Somewhere along the way, though, we agreed that if one of us was to die oversees, the other would take care of both wives. Financially. Emotionally. Whatever needed doing. Which left me dreaming up scenarios that involved velvet gloves and beehives. Grover always fell asleep first. When he’d take to snoring, I’d slip the picture of my sister-in-law out of his jacket and pretend she was there with me in the bottom bunk, getting her needs met. When I was through, I’d slip it back in his jacket. Far as I knew, he never knew.”
“That’s not incest,” says the best man, “but it’s close.”
“After months of scrubbing decks and saluting officers with stripes on their shoulders, we’d get us a weekend of R&R in Saigon. I’d stumble down Tu Do Street with a boom-boom gal on either arm, searching for Grover when he went MIA, which he still does today in the middle of a set. I’d always find him in a phone booth. Me and the gals would rap on the glass and make funny faces. One day he took too long hanging up, so I opened the door and snatched up the phone to tease his debutante wife about the brothels he’d been keeping in business, even if everyone knew he’d been spending all his time and money calling home. When I heard my own wife’s voice on the other end of the line, I was speechless.”
“Ouch,” says the best man. “I guess they’d call that karma in Vietnam.”
“Call it what you want. Everything changed after that. ’Stead of shipmates, me and Grover were ships passing in the night. You’d think we’d have fought more, but that wasn’t the case. I let him have the bottom bunk, and if I couldn’t sleep on account of the top bunk creaking, I’d just stand at the porthole till I got sea legs, watching the fish swim up all puckered and curious. One night I was doing just that. Didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary at first. Bright quick ones and slow dark ones. After a while, my eyes settled on something at rock bottom. Grover saw it over my shoulder. He put his ear to the wall and listened for whale talk. Well, the mouth of that whale opened and out came a barracuda with knives for teeth. T-minus ten and that barracuda launched toward us, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake.”
“So it wasn’t a barracuda?”
“In the US military, face painting is about the only form of self-expression. But soldiers don’t just paint their own faces. They paint faces on boats and choppers and goddamn torpedoes. Come to find, we weren’t the only artists in Nam. When it blew, Grover lost his best set of drums, the ones in his ears. And I lost my eyes. I turned from the porthole to check on him, but my vision got blurrier with each blink. After the grin of that torpedo, the last thing I ever saw was Grover breathing life into the rubber ducky, cool as could be since he couldn’t hear any of it: not the alarm or the screaming or the riptide rushing through the barracks. Our crew was diving overboard since a deck fire had burned up the lifeboats, and once we hit the water, they laid siege to our raft. It was us or them. So me and Grover set aside our differences and joined forces to fend ’em off.”
“And?” says the best man.
“And they drowned in the Gulf of Tonkin,” says Portis.
“Whoa,” says the best man.
“We weren’t about to paddle up the Red River Delta in a rubber ducky. So we took our chances at high sea. A few days adrift and we started seeing things and drinking our own piss, and that’s when I got to thinking about my eyes and his ears. Was it a coincidence I’d been looking at his wife and he’d been talking to mine?”
“Like I said,” says the best man, “karma.”
They finally finish washing the wineglasses. Whereas he’d hung the others batlike to dry, Portis places the last one right side up and lifts a trapdoor in the floor to exhume a dusty bottle of mezcal con gusano he’d at some point stowed away. He pops and sniffs the cork, making sure it’s the right stuff before he thumbs the punt and tips the cradle to decant a dram of golden smoke with the unwelcomed showmanship of a lowbrow connoisseur.
“Go on then, sailor. You said you wanted another drink.” Portis waits for the best man to cough before serving himself a double. “Lucky for us, we were airlifted before the VC could find us. They patched us up and put us on a cargo plane aimed stateside. But by the time we got home the government had declared us KIA and our wives had moved on. We tried talking them out of it, but they were legally remarried and we were officially dead.” Portis pours two more fingers: one for himself, one for his new ally. “We pooled our pensions and bought a boat ’cause boats were all we knew. Set sail for the Caribbean, hopping islands whenever Grover landed a gig. Saint Martin to Saint Thomas, Saint This to Saint That. Wound up in Montego Bay, where Grover played the same tiki bar all month while I lived off Red Stripe and white rum. On payday, a tourist who turned out to be an American businessman cornered Grover after the show. Dubbed him the Beethoven of calypso and asked would he want a steady gig at a brand-new resort in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch? The grand opening was two days away. He’d been hopping islands all summer on a quest for a house band.”
“What did you do?” the best man asks.
“Sailed straight through the night, drinking ourselves sober a time or two. The Caribbean was choppy, but the sea was calmer on the Gulf side. That made for smooth sailing. So smooth Grover fell asleep during his turn at the helm. We hopped the sandbar and coasted right onto the beach at twenty knots, skidding to a halt between these two hotels. We were sure we’d spoiled the deal, but the businessman rushed out from the lobby screaming ‘Ahoy!’ He shook our hands and called the shipwreck ‘picturesque.’ Grover got me a job doing what I do best, mixing drinks and telling big fish stories. We dropped anchor, and we’ve been here ever since.”
Portis pours himself one last nightcap then offers the dregs to the best man, who at present is too agape to drink: “That story can’t be true.”
“In all my years, I don’t reckon I’ve ever told a true story. Some of it happened. Other parts I might’ve made up. To shoot you straight, I’ve told it so many times I can’t remember which is which. Let’s just say it’s based on a true story. Which is good enough for our purposes, wouldn’t you say?”
The best man is in no place to disagree. He empties the mezcal into his wineglass while Portis listens at the trickle for that final plop.
“Sounds like you just met Mister Maguey!” Portis roars. “Now you got to eat him. Some say it’ll give you oomph in bed. Others say it’ll make you loco in the head.”
Twice drunk and doubly bold, the best man shrugs off the superstition and dangles the bleached larva over his gaping grouper mouth.
“Go on then, sailor. Get it over with.” Portis cringes in anticipation. No matter how many magueys he’s eaten in his day, the thought still makes him squeamish. “Long story short, no matter how much you want her, never let a gal stand between the first and second mate.”
“It isn’t her I want,” the best man says before slurping down the worm. “It’s him.”
“Huh?” Portis takes back the bottle and grips it upside down by the neck. “You been trying to woo me with your worm, sailor? ’Cause I can assure you there’ll be none of that on my ship. I served with worm-suckers in Nam. At least back then they kept their worm-sucking to themselves. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Portis points the bottle starboard and says, “Walk the plank.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Portis breaks the bottle on the foremast and brandishes it as a polearm. Fifteen feet below, the infinity pool runs green to blue to violet, the fiber optics morphing so gradually the transition is imperceptible. The best man takes off his rental shoes but doesn’t put down the glass. He would have broken it over Portis’s head were Portis not so alert, double charged with agave and adrenaline. The best man inches out to hang ten off the springboard and, without recourse, jumps. Freefall. Then he’s met with an abrupt and disembodied peace. Like Grover, he can’t hear a thing. And like Portis, he can’t see. He pulls his knees to his chin and wraps his arms around them, staying that way as long as he can. But he knows eventually he’ll have to come up. He surfaces in the deep end and scales the aluminum parentheses of the pool ladder.
“Put some clothes on, worm-sucker!” Portis slings down the tuxedo jacket.
The best man cloaks his shoulders without running his arms through. Beneath the jacket, he still grips the wineglass. He waits shivering for the elevator to descend then illuminates every button on the console when he leans punch-drunk against it, dozing off between floors only to get jolted awake again by each dealuminating ding. Reaching the top, he pulls himself up by the railing and stumbles back out into the cold, for the rooms face outward in the manner of a motel. There’s only one suite on this uppermost floor. A do-not-disturb sign hangs from the knob. He looks through the peephole but it’s all just a blur, much as tonight will be come tomorrow. He knuckles up but can’t bring himself to knock. Instead he holds the wineglass flush against the cruciform paneling and harks a tentative ear to the stem.
Silence. Not the sounds he’d been dreading. No headboard thumping. No box springs squeaking. He lies down to check for feet but can’t see anything under the doorway, not even a line of light. Something or someone is blocking his view.
“That’s not silly,” says the best man. “It had, like, sentimental value.”
“I’ll never forget the day we shipped out to Da Nang. The day I had my first taste of alcohol. Grover too. Made a toast at a portside tavern then boarded a destroyer big as Moby damn Dick. Me and him stood on the poop deck in uniform, and our wives jogged along the pier crying ‘Bon voyage.’ Mine was still in her nightgown and slippers. Grover’s wore velvet gloves and waved like a debutante. Her hair looked like a beehive but smelled like aerosol, not honey.”
“Sounds like you slept with her?”
“I slept with Grover. Which was a bad idea. ’Cause when the captain cut the lights, we’d fight over the bottom bunk the way we had as boys, seeing how bad the top bunk swayed and creaked. We nearly killed each other every day, but in the end we saved each other’s lives. Somewhere along the way, though, we agreed that if one of us was to die oversees, the other would take care of both wives. Financially. Emotionally. Whatever needed doing. Which left me dreaming up scenarios that involved velvet gloves and beehives. Grover always fell asleep first. When he’d take to snoring, I’d slip the picture of my sister-in-law out of his jacket and pretend she was there with me in the bottom bunk, getting her needs met. When I was through, I’d slip it back in his jacket. Far as I knew, he never knew.”
“That’s not incest,” says the best man, “but it’s close.”
“After months of scrubbing decks and saluting officers with stripes on their shoulders, we’d get us a weekend of R&R in Saigon. I’d stumble down Tu Do Street with a boom-boom gal on either arm, searching for Grover when he went MIA, which he still does today in the middle of a set. I’d always find him in a phone booth. Me and the gals would rap on the glass and make funny faces. One day he took too long hanging up, so I opened the door and snatched up the phone to tease his debutante wife about the brothels he’d been keeping in business, even if everyone knew he’d been spending all his time and money calling home. When I heard my own wife’s voice on the other end of the line, I was speechless.”
“Ouch,” says the best man. “I guess they’d call that karma in Vietnam.”
“Call it what you want. Everything changed after that. ’Stead of shipmates, me and Grover were ships passing in the night. You’d think we’d have fought more, but that wasn’t the case. I let him have the bottom bunk, and if I couldn’t sleep on account of the top bunk creaking, I’d just stand at the porthole till I got sea legs, watching the fish swim up all puckered and curious. One night I was doing just that. Didn’t see nothing out of the ordinary at first. Bright quick ones and slow dark ones. After a while, my eyes settled on something at rock bottom. Grover saw it over my shoulder. He put his ear to the wall and listened for whale talk. Well, the mouth of that whale opened and out came a barracuda with knives for teeth. T-minus ten and that barracuda launched toward us, leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake.”
“So it wasn’t a barracuda?”
“In the US military, face painting is about the only form of self-expression. But soldiers don’t just paint their own faces. They paint faces on boats and choppers and goddamn torpedoes. Come to find, we weren’t the only artists in Nam. When it blew, Grover lost his best set of drums, the ones in his ears. And I lost my eyes. I turned from the porthole to check on him, but my vision got blurrier with each blink. After the grin of that torpedo, the last thing I ever saw was Grover breathing life into the rubber ducky, cool as could be since he couldn’t hear any of it: not the alarm or the screaming or the riptide rushing through the barracks. Our crew was diving overboard since a deck fire had burned up the lifeboats, and once we hit the water, they laid siege to our raft. It was us or them. So me and Grover set aside our differences and joined forces to fend ’em off.”
“And?” says the best man.
“And they drowned in the Gulf of Tonkin,” says Portis.
“Whoa,” says the best man.
“We weren’t about to paddle up the Red River Delta in a rubber ducky. So we took our chances at high sea. A few days adrift and we started seeing things and drinking our own piss, and that’s when I got to thinking about my eyes and his ears. Was it a coincidence I’d been looking at his wife and he’d been talking to mine?”
“Like I said,” says the best man, “karma.”
They finally finish washing the wineglasses. Whereas he’d hung the others batlike to dry, Portis places the last one right side up and lifts a trapdoor in the floor to exhume a dusty bottle of mezcal con gusano he’d at some point stowed away. He pops and sniffs the cork, making sure it’s the right stuff before he thumbs the punt and tips the cradle to decant a dram of golden smoke with the unwelcomed showmanship of a lowbrow connoisseur.
“Go on then, sailor. You said you wanted another drink.” Portis waits for the best man to cough before serving himself a double. “Lucky for us, we were airlifted before the VC could find us. They patched us up and put us on a cargo plane aimed stateside. But by the time we got home the government had declared us KIA and our wives had moved on. We tried talking them out of it, but they were legally remarried and we were officially dead.” Portis pours two more fingers: one for himself, one for his new ally. “We pooled our pensions and bought a boat ’cause boats were all we knew. Set sail for the Caribbean, hopping islands whenever Grover landed a gig. Saint Martin to Saint Thomas, Saint This to Saint That. Wound up in Montego Bay, where Grover played the same tiki bar all month while I lived off Red Stripe and white rum. On payday, a tourist who turned out to be an American businessman cornered Grover after the show. Dubbed him the Beethoven of calypso and asked would he want a steady gig at a brand-new resort in the Gulf of Mexico. The only catch? The grand opening was two days away. He’d been hopping islands all summer on a quest for a house band.”
“What did you do?” the best man asks.
“Sailed straight through the night, drinking ourselves sober a time or two. The Caribbean was choppy, but the sea was calmer on the Gulf side. That made for smooth sailing. So smooth Grover fell asleep during his turn at the helm. We hopped the sandbar and coasted right onto the beach at twenty knots, skidding to a halt between these two hotels. We were sure we’d spoiled the deal, but the businessman rushed out from the lobby screaming ‘Ahoy!’ He shook our hands and called the shipwreck ‘picturesque.’ Grover got me a job doing what I do best, mixing drinks and telling big fish stories. We dropped anchor, and we’ve been here ever since.”
Portis pours himself one last nightcap then offers the dregs to the best man, who at present is too agape to drink: “That story can’t be true.”
“In all my years, I don’t reckon I’ve ever told a true story. Some of it happened. Other parts I might’ve made up. To shoot you straight, I’ve told it so many times I can’t remember which is which. Let’s just say it’s based on a true story. Which is good enough for our purposes, wouldn’t you say?”
The best man is in no place to disagree. He empties the mezcal into his wineglass while Portis listens at the trickle for that final plop.
“Sounds like you just met Mister Maguey!” Portis roars. “Now you got to eat him. Some say it’ll give you oomph in bed. Others say it’ll make you loco in the head.”
Twice drunk and doubly bold, the best man shrugs off the superstition and dangles the bleached larva over his gaping grouper mouth.
“Go on then, sailor. Get it over with.” Portis cringes in anticipation. No matter how many magueys he’s eaten in his day, the thought still makes him squeamish. “Long story short, no matter how much you want her, never let a gal stand between the first and second mate.”
“It isn’t her I want,” the best man says before slurping down the worm. “It’s him.”
“Huh?” Portis takes back the bottle and grips it upside down by the neck. “You been trying to woo me with your worm, sailor? ’Cause I can assure you there’ll be none of that on my ship. I served with worm-suckers in Nam. At least back then they kept their worm-sucking to themselves. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Portis points the bottle starboard and says, “Walk the plank.”
“You can’t be serious.”
Portis breaks the bottle on the foremast and brandishes it as a polearm. Fifteen feet below, the infinity pool runs green to blue to violet, the fiber optics morphing so gradually the transition is imperceptible. The best man takes off his rental shoes but doesn’t put down the glass. He would have broken it over Portis’s head were Portis not so alert, double charged with agave and adrenaline. The best man inches out to hang ten off the springboard and, without recourse, jumps. Freefall. Then he’s met with an abrupt and disembodied peace. Like Grover, he can’t hear a thing. And like Portis, he can’t see. He pulls his knees to his chin and wraps his arms around them, staying that way as long as he can. But he knows eventually he’ll have to come up. He surfaces in the deep end and scales the aluminum parentheses of the pool ladder.
“Put some clothes on, worm-sucker!” Portis slings down the tuxedo jacket.
The best man cloaks his shoulders without running his arms through. Beneath the jacket, he still grips the wineglass. He waits shivering for the elevator to descend then illuminates every button on the console when he leans punch-drunk against it, dozing off between floors only to get jolted awake again by each dealuminating ding. Reaching the top, he pulls himself up by the railing and stumbles back out into the cold, for the rooms face outward in the manner of a motel. There’s only one suite on this uppermost floor. A do-not-disturb sign hangs from the knob. He looks through the peephole but it’s all just a blur, much as tonight will be come tomorrow. He knuckles up but can’t bring himself to knock. Instead he holds the wineglass flush against the cruciform paneling and harks a tentative ear to the stem.
Silence. Not the sounds he’d been dreading. No headboard thumping. No box springs squeaking. He lies down to check for feet but can’t see anything under the doorway, not even a line of light. Something or someone is blocking his view.