DARKNESS ON THE EDGE: Tales Inspired by the Songs of Bruce Springsteen Page 2

  Round and round.

  On the boardwalk, you stop and look around to see the people, the stands displaying novelties and food, the glowing lights. You hardly remember leaving the bar. The pedestrian crowd is sparse, but you aren’t surprised. It is a weeknight, just past dinnertime.

  An overweight couple in matching bright red Hawaiian shirts eats ice cream, leans on one another affectionately. Two boys count the coins in their palms in front of a booth that sells sunglasses. Groups of people in silhouette wander in the distance. Against the side of a hot dog cart, a young couple embraces, kissing each other with the desperation of juvenile passion.

  Oddly, you notice little else. The odors and the sounds of this place elude you, as if you bear witness to the performance of ghosts on a make-believe set. You sniff the air, but receive no olfactory cues. You listen, knowing that there should be voices, music, electronic accolades from the arcade machines. You strain to hear something, so that you can feel a part of this place again.

  Finally, a rhythmic pulse creeps into your head. It pumps and crashes and hisses. You turn away from the booths. Your steps rap on the boards in time with that distant beat. At a railing, you stop, clutch the banister. Through the darkness a filmy white line breaks on the shore. Then, you understand. The ocean is calling you, leading you back to this dreadful landmark.

  And there, only twenty yards away, a familiar face waits. Your heart trips and stutters. You leave your place at the railing, cross to a steep set of wooden stairs and descend to the sand.

  Jody stands on the beach, hardly changed at all. Her strawberry blond hair drapes over narrow shoulders. At her back, waves pound the shore, crashing and shushing. For a moment it feels as if nothing has changed. More than thirty years crease and fold and slip away. You smile a moment before the fear turns your blood to shattered cutting ice.

  She can’t be here.

  You look back at the Boardwalk, at the lights and the people meandering over the planks. Your mind grows hazy, buzzing with a distant powerful drone. You look back at Jody, standing motionless on the beach.

  “Please,” you say, taking a step back.

  Don’t leave. She’s why you came back.

  You want to run, but something holds you on the sand, facing Jody. Your mind fills with images, one lying over the top of the other so that none are clear. A single voice, like the teller of a story or the singer of a song, accompanies the images. It is your voice, only calm. Its lulling timbre and rhythmic cadence are strange, but what it says is familiar.

  You belong here. You belong to the shore, to the waves, to the muscle machines that howl in the night.

  For all of your failure to conjure the past only moments before, it comes crashing back. The sand buckles. The cool darkening air shimmers.

  You…

  You drive north on Ocean, crawling with the highway knights sitting low on their Harleys; checking out the machine-head toughs sporting chrome and revving their Hemis to the heavens. The girls in their bellbottom jeans and broken-zippered boots giggle and wave, then cover their bright angel faces with long fingers tipped in watermelon paint. Streetlight and stars concede to the parade of headlights. Motor perfume, thick and grimy, mingles with the scents of the grilling meat from Boardwalk shacks and the spirits in throat. Clouds of salty mist hang over all. On the left, young rock-and-roll, just hitting puberty and all the more cocksure and wild for it, rages in wooden shacks where the cools gather to fill their heads, their hips and their feet with honky tonk hymns written by low class priests, singing of Gods made in their own image. To the right, past the Boardwalk, off in the darkness, the waves play out a rhythm silenced by the thunder of engine and guitar but felt in the soul and lap of every man and woman on the circuit. Sidewalks team with shag-haired boys and straight-haired girls, each of them half a beast hunting to make themselves whole before daylight. In the street, muscle machines and mom-and-pop coaches crawl along the avenue.

  You make a left and then another, down Kingsley. Left again. Round and round. Always chasing the closest horizon, measuring freedom by gas gauge and the remains of a gin bottle.

  Night whispers promises, drawing her children to the loop, and their orbit–circles upon circles–is gravitational, pulling the innocent in and keeping them close.

  Parked in the lot, your Chevy part of the herd, you pull a bottle from under the seat. You open it, make your wish and release the juniper genie into your mouth. The gin bites. You hate its taste. But the smell of whiskey makes Jody sick, so you drink this. A small sacrifice. One of hundreds. You make another wish, take another hit.

  In the arcade, amid the popping squeals of the pinball machines, lights jumping, Richie and Mike plan a drag. They call each other pussy and dork and fag until the deal is set. They wait for their girlfriends to come back from the john, still posturing like gladiators beneath a coliseum crowd. Three little girls, with barely enough rack to support their halters, cheeks slashed pink with mothers’ rouge, race by, looking terrified.

  Pinballs clang and crack, trying to escape. Their reward is another paddle whack, another bumper shove or a fast descent into darkness.

  You stand with a smoke in your mouth, looking hard and bored like it’s all just another moment–one of millions–that will come and go with no more meaning than the striking of a match. For some it’s a pose, a mask handed out in school for all of the shore boys to wear, but for you it’s the way of your face. You are hard. You are bored. High school is a year gone, the diploma nothing but a piece of paper shoved in a drawer under mom’s carton of Pall Malls. The nights come. Round and round. The night dies. You haul sofas for Mr. Lombardo so that the Joneses and the Smiths have comfortable places to sit before going home to your parent’s tattered Sears couch. You sit there and wait until one of the Kingsley Boys calls or Jody is finished at the bookshop.

  They used to mean the world to you, closer than family. Knowing you’d be with them made you ache with a comfortable lust. Now, that longing is for something different, something distant, something beyond the promise of the night. But Jody is off work, and the night comes. Round and round.

  The gladiators Richie and Mike puff out their chests in greeting to their girlfriends now back from the john. Mike drops his smoke on the cold tile floor and crushes it under a boot toe. They will race. One will lose. Neither wins because tomorrow will be the same. These carousel horses can never claim victory.

  You leave the arcade and step into the street where the herd of Camaros, Firebirds and Barracudas roll. Tinny music pumps from speakers to greet the growling engines, the shouting voices and the muffled concerts of the shore-side troubadours in an orchestra of soul and steel. Jody waits for you by The Pony. You’ll meet her. She’ll talk about her day and want you to talk. But it’s all been said. Recounting your day is a familiar song, pounding at your ears. All chorus. No verse. You’ll hate her for making you sing it. Then, you’ll walk back to the lot where your car waits. In the backseat, Jody will open up to you just like she’s done every Friday for three years.

  She used to be the cure for your disease. Now another symptom.

  To the north, a distant and welcoming darkness and you know that if you had once, just once, gone straight instead of turning left, you would be someplace else. For the hundreds and thousands of miles driven, you wonder where you could have gone.

  “Please,” you say to Night, hoping she’ll understand and grant the wish you’ve whispered so often, the one you tell your pillow with gin-foul breath.

  You nearly made it out. Phil lived in Delaware. He had a spare room. Knew about a warehouse that needed hands. Jody wanted to go, wanted to see the rest of the world. But her brother plucked the dream from her. Bobby, with the shore to his back, went face down in the waves, chasing a bottle of Jim Beam with a shot of the Atlantic. Jody used you like a shrink, like a nurse and like a priest, her lips spilling guilt and agony to your shoulder. For her, leaving was forgotten. But still you could go somewhere beyond the circuit where the streets were clean and quiet and life meant a little more than horsepower and neon. Then you blew a rod, dragging for laughs with Hoyt Decola. Your freedom machine needed repair, so the money you had went up like smoke. The charred dream that remained just more litter for the boardwalk.

  Along the crowded sidewalks, you march with concrete boots. People walk and stumble by. Some look at you, recognizing breed, a single face on a hundred bodies. You stop and turn to the wall, check for cold-eyed cops and pull the bottle from your pocket: another miserable shot with the promise of miracles.

  Jody waits in front of The Pony. Her hair is strawberry straw hanging like curtains to hide her shoulders. She holds a cigarette to her lips, staring over the line of cars to the sky above the ocean. On her pink t-shirt, your name is written in rainbow-colored letters baked on the fabric. Hip hugger denim caresses her thighs, then erupts into bells that tent her feet. Through the wall behind her, The Jukes beat out a song that makes a man at Jody’s back bop.

  She wraps her arms around your neck, kisses you. Wants to know where you’ve been. You slide an arm around her waist, tell her something came up.

  Jody wants to know about your day and you shrug. Normally, you’d sing that song just to make her feel better, but tonight you can’t bring yourself to it. The night is different. Everything is the same, and you tell yourself that the difference is in your head, but you feel it. Something. It pulls at your gut.

  You take her to the boardwalk instead of the car because you don’t want to feel her on you; it’s too much like a jacket, sleeves wrapped and locked around your chest. The shops with food and sunglasses, the people; a movie that never changes. So, your shoes thump a rhythm on the boards. Jody looks at you like a hero. You look at the planks like a convict. People come and go. Their voices fill your ears, and then fade.

  Beneath your arm, you feel Jody pause. Looking up, you notice the empty peanut cart, the railing, the stairs. Fleshy sand fans toward the great black pond that seduced her brother. You know she doesn’t like coming here.

  You know I don’t like coming here.

  But there’s an answer on the sand. You can’t see it, can hardly imagine it. Still, you feel it. Its chain wraps around your heart, pulls tight.

  I want to go back to the car.

  Before, you would have stopped and changed direction, doing anything for Jody. She was the completion of you as a man. Your jokes were met with her laugh. Your foolishness, her scowl. Her sweet soft body refused you nothing. Once, your dreams were hers, shared and discussed late at night while sweaty stomachs cooled between you. Why did that end? When? With Bobby?

  You look into her frightened eyes. Baby, it’ll be all right.

  She trusts you and offers her hand so you can guide her down to the beach. Sand crumbles beneath your boots. Jody stumbles and yelps. A nervous giggle follows as you pull her tight and hold her steady. Her hair brushes your cheek. You smell the baby shampoo she uses on it. For a moment, the salt, the trash and engine fumes are gone and your head is cleansed by the scent of her and the chain tightens around your heart, pulling you toward the waves.

  When you stop, it’s because your heart–its slow tic tock–needs winding. So you press your lips to Jody’s and taste the bubble gum gloss frosting them. The taste sparks no desire, no pleasure-memory. It’s just sweet and sticky.

  Jody clutches at you, binding herself to your ribs. Over her head, you see the one that called you standing near the battle of wave and sand.

  He is another circuit tough with faded jeans too tight and the sleeves of his t-shirt rolled. A pack of Lucky’s hides beneath the fabric at his shoulder.

  This tough is different, though. His threat doesn’t grow from muscle or blade. You tell yourself that it’s the gin or the trapped beast in your head or the incest of the two breeding dementia.

  You know Bobby’s face. Around this boy, a billow of smoke as black as the sky curls and dances. Looking closer, you see that he is not resurrected with skin or bone, but rather surf, beach and misty shadow, formed by the wet and the dirt and the air of this place. Night fills the cavities of his eyes and grains of wet sand lay like smooth sheets of brow and cheek. Dry sand weaves his shirt and chutes of seawater form the twin columns of his legs, the cascade an illusion of rippling pale blue cotton. His edges are rough and fray, working outward to become filaments of dark smoke, reaching to the sky. Or perhaps the reverse is true, and Night reached down to sculpt this phantom.

  Bobby looks at you. Except for the whirling mist and the fall of his pant legs, he is motionless, staring. Holding Jody closer to your chest, you look on in frightened wonder. Now your heart beats faster, the way you hoped it would with her kiss.

  You know what he wants. The knowledge is inside of you like the chain that brought you to this place. He wants you to turn away and leave Jody on the sand with him. The shore ghost wants to share secrets with his sister.

  Turn away. Walk back to the avenue where the living go round and round.

  You push Jody away, gently and with great care. Her eyes are bright and expectant as if anticipating a compliment or proposal. And you turn away to look at the boardwalk and the wall of light rising behind it from the circuit. Behind you, she speaks your name. She sounds confused and hurt, but you don’t turn back. You can never look back. With your next step, you feel her hand on your shoulder but you don’t stop walking. The hand is gone, and she speaks another name.

  Bobby?

  So, you walk over the sand, each step uncertain, earth crumbling underfoot. You climb the stairs toward the boardwalk, up and away from the sand. You walk along Ocean, the motorcade little more than a hum in your ears, a blur from the corner of your eye. Night suffuses the headlights, dulls the neon and blacks out the stars. The faces you’ve seen too long are now flat and featureless, masks distorted by erosion.

  You’re behind the wheel of your car, driving north on Ocean but you don’t turn left. You keep going, away from the circuit to the great darkness ahead, and you don’t look back.

  But now, you are back.

  You let the last of the memories slip away. Jody stands closer now, though still not close.

  From where you stand you see sand running in smooth sheets over her cheeks and draping long, like hair to her shoulders. The grains mound at her chest, and your name is carved in relief, just empty letters with the night showing through. Bits of captured ocean fill her expressionless eyes and weave the material of her bell-bottom pants.

  She drowned the night you left. Just like her brother, Jody walked into the ocean to dream face down. Night demanded a sacrifice, payment for your release from this place, and when it appeared, wearing Bobby’s façade, you gave Jody to it and walked away.

  You drove for days after that, what little cash you carried fed the gas tank, distance far more important than meat. Then came the jobs, then Susan and the children. Through it all, the numb of that night remained with you like an opiate cloud. You hid culpability behind that mist, kept Jody there for years at a time. When she was able to break through, guilt pecked at your belly, though caused no real damage.

  But tonight memory burns away denial’s morphine. Looking at Jody’s image, guilt claws at your belly and sends acid tears to your eyes.

  The easiest thing to do is to step forward, offer Night’s sculpture of Jody your hand and let her guide you to peace. She can take you to the water’s edge, lead you out and pull you under. A few moments of fear, perhaps panic, but then the pain and guilt will wash away on the salty tide, fear streaming from you like tears, responsibility forever behind.

  The prospect of peace soothes.

  Your kids are grown and don’t need you anymore. Susan will be fine, might prefer to spend the remainder of her life without you. There is insurance, and her sister or one of the kids will take her in. If they sell the house, there will be more money to get them through.

  It would be so easy, you think, and a scalding desperation fills your chest. It’s what you want. What you need. Anything to escape the damned circuit of your life.

  Jody reaches out a sandy palm for you. You look at her emotionless face, your chest heaving with sobs. Tears burn lines over cheek and jaw.

  “I’m sorry,” you say. You are looking at the specter, but Susan fills your thoughts. You can’t be sure which woman is meant to receive the apology.

  You picture Susan then, screaming at you, throwing a glass at the wall in frustration. She breaks into sobs, and clutches at her face, and you are there, arm around her holding as tightly as you can, hoping to draw the misery from her. Even now, with her thousands of miles away, you feel the emotions burn your chest. You want it to stop, for her and for yourself. You just want the pain to stop.

  “I’m so sorry,” you whisper, feeling Night’s creation pulling, though you refuse to move. “I can’t make this mistake again.”

  But you owe so much.

  You wipe at your eyes and turn away. You walk over the sand toward the boardwalk as you did all of those years ago. Night’s grip on you tightens, tries to pull you back, but you fight with each step.

  Susan is in your mind, and you are no longer swaddled by the lie that she will be okay. Every time her vehement pain ceased, she reached for you, clutched at your neck, cried apologies into your collar. She needs your warmth, your understanding and your love. If you owe any debt it is to her.

  A tendril of sand whips around your face, momentarily blinding with grit. You close your eyes, feel another stinging lash crack across your brow. You keep walking.

  When you reach the stairs, you turn and look back. The image of Jody remains on the beach. Around her, long cords of sand whip the air, leaving dusty clouds in their wake. You blink the grit from your eyes, let the last tears wash it away.

  Maybe this escape is a reprieve, perhaps punishment. It certainly can’t be called justice, but it is right. You will follow the course of your life, carrying the miseries and the joys you are due. Jody will be with you now, no longer obscured by numbing denial. Bobby too. When you reach home, you will hold Susan in your arms. Burdens from the past will find their place among the trials of the present. And in the end, you will gratefully carry them all with nothing forgotten and nothing forgiven.