Listing, Short Story

The sun had now cleared the ocean and the hood of the truck, casting a soft but bright light onto the vinyl dash and the notepad beside him. It was a winter light, and without waves and the blowing of sand, it was hard to know how cold it was without being outside, without feeling it. He wasn’t hungry and he hadn’t been, but the cold of the cab and the fog of his breath made his mouth feel empty. He pushed as much air as he could out of his lungs and the windows seemed to steam. Absently, he flicked the lead of the chewed pencil against his left index finger where it marked the heavy callous. He didn’t know what he was going to put down. He knew the list would have 22 things. He had, with a crude line, demarked two categories, but as an afterthought had circled an area down the page for possible inclusion as a third category. He had been doing this for months now, and knew occasionally the lists would require more ambiguity than he might initially plan for.
This would be a list of reasons to go or reasons to stay. He had done this one before, and the first few came to him automatically, and he intoned them under his breathe as he wrote, in monotone, like a prayer he had memorized.
There was familiarity. Familiarity was always on the list but often on different sides. There were the houses he would pass that would tell him stories about himself, about the people that he knew or had known. There was the yellow square of window light from the attic bedroom of a girl he knew, when he drove by the house slowly. There was a week, right after high school when her parents went away that they practiced being grownup. The rest of the short relationship, the girl herself were not significant, but that week was always something singular. He remembered her as being unfathomably soft, fit, but all rounded angles and curves. He felt his own boy’s body all elbows and lank and bony prominences she was too tolerant or naïve to mention. He remembers leaving for brief errands in the middle of the week, and her coming to that small yellow square of light to watch his car back out of the driveway. He remembers how it felt, knowing that he was coming back, and knowing that he was missed.
There’s the old school. You can’t see the building, except for a few patches in the fall, but you can see the driveway and the sign and the yellow buses pouring in and out during the year. Those few from his class who have remained are a loose coalition. Outside of a few good friends, there are the very familiar acquaintances. Those he’s grown up with, and sees once a year when a mutual friend drops back home and wants to pull together some old gang from memory and fiction. There’s that look that they exchange. There’s the conversation of course, the brief and awkward summation of one lost year. There’s the repeated false promise that of course, since they’re so close, they’ll be sure to hang out now, maybe in a week, or maybe a few. But the look. First there’s the look. The secret handshake of despair, the unspoken promise not to illuminate the shared secret of those who did not leave. He scrawls the look down on reasons to go, and makes a quick underline.
There was the Ocean, but there would be others. There were the seasons that made him feel older. There was the old maple by the bridge over the small river that cordoned the town line that would transform so completely every season. He had noticed it as long as he could remember, in a private way that resembled ownership. It occurred to him, briefly, that if he left for too long, the tree might die before he could come back. The thought of it, gone, or worse, still there, dead and unattended, barren unchanging branches marching gradually to rot.
There was watching the sun set behind clouds, and being able to then tell what way the wind would blow in the morning. In the morning, he’d take his coffee out to the picnic table left in the yard, even in the cold, and watch the steam rise off it to be carried away in a decipherable location. There was the sturdy picnic table, the same rust color that all New England picnic tables are painted. Abandoned to constant use, left out all year, its signs of wear were apparent, but not excessive. There was no rot and the boards never creaked or swayed. There was the burden of well made things, built to outlast you, an aesthetic of unceasing utility.
The radio is on for the comfort noise brings, and there is a bit of story over the static that has been all over the news. Local man, seventy years old, wakes fully after 58 years in a coma. They don’t call it a coma, they called it sleeping sickness back then, and it sounds colloquial for the newscasts. They talk about the era America has passed through, about a ninety year old nurse he has never met that took care of him for twenty five years, being flown in from her own nursing home in Florida for a reunion. They mention how well cared for he has been, how his hair was always kept so neat, his old man body so relatively unused he could live to be one hundred. There is no one alive now that knew him very well then, no family to speak of. They line up news crews and camera men, and pose him with Kennedy campaign buttons, with posters of sports teams come and gone in the half century plus. Each picture, his unchanging pose, oblivious to the room’s merriment, a terrified twelve year old, staring at his withered and unused hands. Reason for leaving.
There’s the first weekend in June when the people come back. There is that Monday in October when the very last of them is gone. There is waiting in his car, on this beach, writing this list again on another October when the streets are empty, looking at the houses and wondering who he knew that stayed. There are the houses with the lights left on, or houses where the lights turn on mechanically to give the false impression of occupancy. In a few hours, across the bay, in the clear cold dark, they sparkle almost the way stars would. He wonders how much darker, how pitch black this dim winter beach town would be without them.
There are reasons for staying. There’s knowing what there is to do at any given time, regardless of wanting to or not. There’s not dying in a nearly unfurnished room thousands of miles away, waiting to be found until neighbors complain or a landlord wants his check. Neighbors with not much to say, no one really knew him, he just showed up from we don’t know where, kept to himself.
There are the white crocuses that will come up early in the spring, when it’s still too cold, before anything else. There are the weeds that will grow beside them, and the dandelions, but the groundskeeper will take care of them, and no one will notice anyway.
There’s his dentist appointment in the fall.
Knowing the name of where he was. Not just town and county, knowing the points on the map, the names of the lighthouses, small islands that would surface on eep tides. Clevelend Light, Halftide rock, Sculpin Ledge, Pulpit Rock,. Real names, as old as any map. So few people knew them they were almost secret. You can’t move to a place you’re not from and ever know the names of places like a town you’re born in. Who knew, in California if anyone bothered to name what used to be a reef where the sea floor dropped fifteen feet. He loved the poetry of the sound of them.
The list, having filled the columns of the notebook provided for them, had finished in a tie. The decision was too big, something would have to make it for him, something would have to tell him why. No one he knew had any knowledge of leaving. A newspaper sheet made its way across the parking lot and stuck on the jagged wooden remainder of a dune wall. Its halves inflated like jib sails, anchoring it perfectly. If the paper blew to the right, he would leave within three days. Within a week, left, and he would wait another season, wait until that first week of spring when he was always happy.
Five minutes and the paper doesn’t move. He’s staring at the ocean, at the way it changes from dawn to morning, and now the waves have come with the tide shift, and the wind brings the lull of sand against the car. There is a boat, moving quickly across the empty horizon, almost to the lighthouse. It’s a big ship, a working boat he can tell. It’s coming towards his direction but it is listing, significantly, despite the moderate sea. He can tell something is wrong, and the boat is sending up too much oil smoke. He knows there might be no one else looking out at it, and thinks, maybe, to do something, but doesn’t know what. The boat would have a radio, or might just be dragging something heavy, or working out its bilge. He knows he won’t do something. He can’t picture the captain, but imagines the crew. From the boat, you can see the shore, but it’s too far to swim in cold waters. Blue smoke might catch in your eyes, and the sound of untied cargo crashes from unhatched shelves. Maybe you’re from someplace far away, and can’t understand the sound on the radio. The animal howl of urgent voices in a language you don’t know.
It’s listing heavy now, and he knows the movement of boats enough to understand trouble. Listing, once your momentum moves from a decent equilibrium to leaning, how you take on water, how you can’t bilge fast enough, you sink further.
That moment. It strikes him with cold panic and breaks a sweat across his neck he doesn’t feel. That moment when you know you have to leave the boat. When you think of the pictures you have with you of the people you know and not the people themselves, who are too far away. The labor to begin swimming the distance you know you can’t bridge, your own voice with no one to hear and no one who would understand you, not knowing the names of the places around you, of the islands and currents and reefs, but knowing you would stay there amongst them. Reasons for staying: the final end to familiar things, knowing you wouldn’t be familiar to anyone ever again. Desolation. The fear of dying in space.
His attention is pulled back from the ocean as the paper luffs in the shifting wind. He squints and convinces himself that it’s a trick of new daylight and angles, that the boat would be alright, and there would be no reason to watch it regardless.
He feels the truck shudder into reverse, closes his eyes for a brief second, and visualizes every aspect of his ride home. There’s the same drive through one of the town’s two main roads, their intersection in the empty center of the town, the potholes he avoids without having to notice. There’s the parking lot by the beach that will fill up with cars in the summer, the small stretch of three season restaurants that will swell in summer with people who he’ll never talk to. The stretch of road by devils foot island, the lookout spot to coffin point. There is the church they’d marry him in next to the graveyard where he’d be buried. A last gust of wind, and the newspaper blows right and keeps moving until it is small and distant and beyond him. He was leaving. Obviously, he was leaving. He turned the page in his book before closing it, enough room still left in the notebook that he wouldn’t need another one yet. He closed his eyes for a brief second, and saw the road again in front of him, could taste the salt of the air, the mix of oil and noise shaking him awake as the truck kicked into drive.