Acceptance(28)

All that warranted was a pained smile. Everybody knew the ghost stories about the forgotten coast.

“And it’s probably just a coincidence, but ever since your freak-out in the yard, our readings are off—distorted. Sometimes it is like the equipment is junk, doesn’t work, but we’ve tested it. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m right, am I not, Saul?”

His “freak-out” in the yard. Henry definitely was trying to get a rise out of him.

“Oh yes, it’s working, all right.” Saul tried to sound cheery.

Anyone would have thought Henry, especially, a kind of buffoon and his stilted attempts at conversation signs of social awkwardness. But he was often unnerving to Saul, even just standing there.

So he kicked them both out, called Charlie to ask him if he could have lunch, locked up his living quarters, and drove to the village bar to take a break.

The village bar was an impromptu place, ad hoc style depending on who was around. Today it was a barbecue station out back and a cooler full of domestic beer. Paper plates from some kid’s birthday party, cake with candles against a pink background. Saul and Charlie sat outside, on the worn deck that faced the sea, at a table under a faded blue umbrella.

They talked about Charlie’s day on the boat and a new resident who’d bought a house half demolished by a hurricane, and how Old Jim really needed to refurbish the village bar because “it’s not cool to have a dive bar in a place with no decent bars to compare it to.” How maybe they’d check out that rock band Charlie’d been telling him about. How maybe instead they’d just stay in bed all day.

How the Light Brigade was getting on Saul’s nerves.

“Henry’s a freak,” he said to Charlie. “He’s got a stare like some kind of uncanny undertaker. And Suzanne just follows him everywhere.”

“They can’t come around forever,” Charlie said. “One day they’ll be gone. Little freaks. Freak Brigade.” Testing out words for the fun of it, perhaps because they’d both had some beers already.

“Maybe, but in the meantime they’re giving me the creeps.”

“Could be they’re undercover agents from forestry or environmental protection?”

“Sure, because I’m dumping chemicals all night long.”

Charlie was joking, but the forgotten coast had suffered from a decade or two of lax regulations in what was an “unincorporated area.” The wilderness hid its share of rotting barrels, some of them hidden on old abandoned farmsteads, half sunk into the pine loam.

They took up the conversation later, at Charlie’s two-room cottage just down the street. A couple of photographs of his family, some books, not much in the fridge. Nothing Charlie couldn’t toss in a knapsack if he ever decided to take off, or move in with someone.

“Are you sure they’re not escapees from an insane asylum?”

Which made Saul laugh, because just the summer before two sanitarium residents had escaped from outside of Hedley and made their way down to the forgotten coast, managing to remain free for almost three weeks before being caught by the police.

“If you took away the insane people, no one would be left.”

“Except me,” Charlie said. “Except me and, maybe, you.”

“Except the birds and the deer and the otters.”

“Except the hills and the lakes.”

“Except the snakes and the ladders.”

“What?”

Except by then they had so lit each other up under the sheets that they could have been saying anything, and were.

* * *

It was Gloria who changed his mind about seeing a doctor. The next day, with Henry and Suzanne back up in the lighthouse, him down below, she appeared in the early afternoon to shadow him. He was so used to her that if she’d not shown up, he would’ve thought something was wrong.

“You’re different,” Gloria said, and he chewed on that for a bit.

This time she was leaning against the shed, watching him as he resodded part of the lawn. Volunteer Brad had promised to come in and help, but hadn’t shown up. The sun above was a huge gob of runny yellow. The waves were a rushing vibration in his awareness, but muffled. One of his ears had been blocked since he’d woken up, no doubt because he’d slept on it funny. Maybe he was getting too old for this kind of work after all. Maybe there was a reason why lighthouse keepers had to retire at fifty.

“I’m a day older and wiser,” he replied. “Shouldn’t you be in school? Then you’d be wiser, too.”

“Teacher work day.”

“Lighthouse-keeper work day here,” he said, grunting as he broke the soil with a shovel. His skin felt elastic, formless, and a tic under his left eye kept pulsing in and out.