The shore looks close enough to reach with seven minutes of hard paddling but he makes his neck twist back toward the ocean, makes his eyes focus on the horizon. His right foot slips from its perch on his board, landing in a pocket of water that is almost an ice cube, and slumps motionless in the middle of the current, breathlessly whimpering.
*
Jacob’s pocket vibrated as he walked past three shoulder-high mounds of grey gravel-flecked snow like pedestrian guardrails on Tremont Street. The blizzard had dumped more than four feet of snow on the city in two days, and the removal crews were still slugging it out in a prizefight with Old Man Winter. Boston was beginning to resuscitate itself through short steps over the icy patchwork sidewalk. He pulled his phone out with a gloved hand and it took three rings to hit the answer button.
‘I’m out!’ Kirsten’s voice screamed from his phone.
Jacob hadn’t seen her when she was fully conscious since they met at Grasshopper four days ago. He would walk back to her apartment on Huntington Street after hours of staring at the editing screen to find her at her desk, facedown and drooling over chapbooks, making a Rorschach of her analytic circles, slashes, and margin notes. In the few minutes between rubbing her back and collapsing next to her in bed, he tried to pack for San Diego.
‘Where are you?’ His foot shifted on a mini-pond of ice.
‘I’m skipping down Boyleston like an idiot since I just dropped off all my work!’ she gushed again, making Jacob pull the phone away from his ear.
‘Awesome! I turned mine in earlier today. Isn’t it crazy that we’re finally done?’ he smiled. ‘Hey, I’m almost at Boyleston now, keep your grapes peeled for me.’
He mentally ran through a cursory list of things to do in the next 36 hours before they flew out. The sky was still grey and bitter and though a cloud of steam appeared at every breath, the weatherman hadn’t said anything about more snow.
They were finally at the end of four and a half years of work and dying to see the fasten seatbelt sign, the blue Pacific expanding for miles, the scarlet and canary flames of a bonfire licking the midnight sky. Two minutes of mental ticking-off and he rounded the corner onto Boyleston. His legs stutter stepped in excitement and little winged insects hatched in his stomach.
Jacob scanned both sides of the street for her in between downward glances for ice by his feet. As his head popped up, he spied behind a passing car her scarlet hat with a few chunks of hair poking from the side and front. She looked up and over to him, her cheeks almost cracking from their smile and waved both of her hands spastically.
He beamed back and started across the street so quickly to scoop her up in his arms and swing her around like in a Frank Capra movie, that he didn’t see the cab hurtling down Boyleston.
Her eyes were moons and her hands flapped to say what her mouth couldn’t, when out of his periphery, Jacob glimpsed the cab and grabbed himself less than a tire width from the cab’s hood and threw himself back towards the sidewalk. He faintly heard Kirsten say ‘Oh Shit!’ as his left foot landed on a patch of ice, sliding out and up until he was heels over head in front of her, the latter smacking like a wet potato against the pavement. His head rolled to the side and he blinked the blue dots from his eyes as he tried to heft himself off the side of the street and hold Kirsten, who was in the middle of the street, racing across to scoop him up in her arms, and their eyes locked in a pre-Technicolor gaze as the screeching brakes of a brown car going far too fast locked far too late.
*
He looks back to the shore to check his bags out of habit, though only one other person has been on the beach all day.
Jacob feels his board rise under him. He crests over a double-overhead wave and paddles out to get in position for the third wave of the set. Turning around, he sees the wave roll towards him, then realizes that the hue of the horizon made the wave look smaller than it actually is, and he’s too far inside. His deltoid and trapezium muscles tear themselves into sinew while they push water as hard and quick as they can.
He feels the tail take the wave and in one motion pops to his feet, quickly crossover stepping to the center. The cartilage inside his knees pops and cracks like bubble wrap as he lowers himself as far as the sense of balance allows and grabs the rail to try and salvage this mastodon of ocean water. He pushes his back foot down and inside, inching over until it drags in the face of the wave. The board stabilizes and hurtles him across the middle of the face.
The crest swallows the horizon, spitting and foaming like a washing machine filled with dish soap. He looks back and for a second the wave and the seagulls and the sand mashing on the ocean floor are drowned by the blood in his ears.
And everything is quiet, and still, and dampened enough for Jacob to hear himself say ‘Oh. Shit,’ very calmly.
As the crest avalanches on him and rips the board from under his feet it catches him softly in the trough of the wave and curls him thirteen-feet up the face and throws him back over the falls then throttles him towards the inky Atlantic floor. The rushing of the wave goes silent as he floats without sense of gravity. The sandy floor sprints up to meet the side of his face and turns him upward, his heels lightly dragging against ridges along the bottom. He watches the serene turbulence pass over him. Like from an opened bottle of absolving champagne, a burst of all the guilty bubbles flow out of his mouth and drift towards the surface. And he relaxes his body to the underwater currents, content for just a moment to float and be weightless.
Pugs
I dodged his jab, but dropped my stance and caught his right on my cheek, sending squares of blood across the screen. Lime-green spirals shot from my head as Coach barked syllables and clapped his hands. A hummingbird pulse on the jab button, but I was too tired, or hurt or something. Hands swayed by my waist like Everlast pendulums and left Kieran to finish me off. For three seconds his fingers danced over the buttons, then he said Sorry, Dad, right as his glove turned into an anvil and connected with my jaw. On the screen, I rocketed around the moon, green men snickering at the Xs over my eyes.
‘Wanna play again? I’ll go easy this time.’ His doe eyes could disarm Jesse James.
‘I only see you one blastin’ day a week,’ I said, thinking no decent pug would’ve opened their shoulders like that. I grabbed a drumstick from the bucket sitting on my door-and-cinderblock coffee table. ‘You sure you want to spend the whole time playing videogames?’
He looked up at me and Jesse James fell again; I gave into my eighth ‘last game.’ My fingertips burned like I’d been rubbing them over sandpaper, thumb and forearms cramped from pressing the buttons so hard, even though the boy kept telling me they’re not pressure sensitive. Seven years old, and tossing out phrases like pressure sensitive.
‘Pop,’ he said during the second round.
‘What?’ I tried to jab but kept hitting block, either because of my frequently-broken sausage fingers or the grease on the controller. He landed a cross that sent me to the tarp. The health bar under ‘Kieran’ was full blue; the one under ‘Dad’ laughed at me. I readjusted on the couch and a spring poked me through my work pants. ‘What, Kieran?’
‘Are you letting me win so I tell Mom I had a good time?’
‘What are you talking about? Did she say that?’ I wobbled to my feet and as soon as the ref dropped his arm, Kieran sent me right back to the tarp. TKO. At least I didn’t go into orbit that time.
‘No. I was just asking.’
‘Eat some chicken. Need some meat on you.’ I drank of water from a mason jar, selected rematch before he could ask. ‘Just don’t know how you can play for so long.’
‘It’s easy. When I try to punch you like this—’ my head flew black, red squares on the tarp—‘press the start button and you’ll block it. See?’
‘I get it, Kieran.’ By some freak chance—meaning he let me—I landed a two-one combo and he kissed the boards, only to pop back up like a spring.
‘Don’t worry. I told Neil you we
re better than him. He’s not very good at this either.’
‘That so?’ Kieran landed five straight. Stars circled my head. Coach barked and clapped.
‘Mom says it’s because he’s darn Irish and they can’t fight.’
I laughed to myself and chewed on the inside of my cheek.
Kieran adds, ‘But he can hit a baseball really far. He’s a good pitcher, too.’
‘Seems you like him pretty well.’
Kieran shrugs. ‘He’s nice. I don’t like it when his dog is over. She eats my shoes and I stepped in her piss three times and once her slobber got into my controller and I couldn’t play. But she’s nice.’
When Carol and I were getting divorced, we took Kieran to see a shrink, make sure he’d adjust. He said Kieran seemed fine, but showed some signs of internalization. Since then, I had a hard time figuring out what Kieran actually thought and what he was tying to make himself believe.
Somehow I’d worked Kieran down to a quarter health, but he rallied with a flurry of shots. Even when I was a top-flight pug, I couldn’t’ve held it, and my computer version was no more fortunate. He went down, stayed down.
‘Dad, are you even trying?’
‘Dammit, Kieran. Yes, I’m trying.’
‘You should be good at this, dad. You did it in real life.’
‘Boy, what the hell you know about boxing?’ I dropped my controller to the carpet padding and retreated to the kitchen. Hanging over the sink, I ran water over my fists and forearms. Inhaled, held it, let it out slow. Beeps in the other room, and Kieran was probably beating my guy to a pulp. I turned the water colder, breathed. Got my head straight. If only I’d learned to do that years ago, I wouldn’t be in this situation, defending myself against some law clerk patsy. I took my work home with me like most men, but I was in the wrong business.
Another breath, then I poured juice and soda water into a Transformers glass for Kieran, grabbed a Coke for myself. The shrink told us to limit his sugar, too.
Kieran was drawing shapes in dust with his finger. I set his glass in front of him. He looked up at me, whispered thanks and held my wrist. His finger ran over a scar on my forearm, leaving trails of grey. Post-fight bar brawl: fighting one of my football buddies, and my aim was off. Bone jutted just like a tree through a frozen lake.
‘Was this from when you were a puta?’
I coughed on my soda, bubbles up my nose. ‘What did you just say?’
‘Did you get this when you were boxing as a puta?’
Laughing, I wrapped my arm around my boy. Me and Carol used to fight in Spanish so Kieran wouldn’t pick up any curse words.
‘It’s pug, Kieran. Like the dog.’
‘Oh.’ He took a bite of my drumstick, set it down on the door. ‘Can we do one more then play football outside?’ He handed me my controller.
Halfway through the first round, he fell. When the bell rung, he was on the ropes, pulling himself up. He hadn’t hit me once. Four uppercuts in the second and he’s wobbling, ready to get sent into orbit. And it wasn’t until he confused me, trying to tell me what buttons to hit, that I noticed. His boxer was now tall with red hair. ‘Neil’ under the flashing health bar. He’d changed it when I was in the kitchen.
‘Get me, Dad! Knock my blastin’ head off!’ His fingertips, white from pushing button so hard. Eyes squinted, face flushed and contorted. Like he’d just gone eight rounds and missed the decision by a few points. Missed the payday by a few points, and his boy was going to have to eat more Wish Sandwiches.
I pressed pause, set the controller down, lifted my boy up by his armpits and carried him out into the sunshine.
###
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