By Jeff Dingler
I thought it was just going to be a nice trip to the beach. Really, it’s all Josie’s fault; I never would’ve taken this day-drunk vacation if she hadn’t run out on me with that neanderlithic yoga instructor (damn you, Josie, you never even liked yoga). But there I was, walking the boardwalk of the Lost Flamingo Hotel—a heat-bleached resort catered to the needs of “retired singles that mingle”—the sun irradiating the white sand, all those rippling blades of heat, my flip flops turning to plastic goo. I’d left Orlando (that swamp of neon-colored garbage) and headed to the less populated beaches of north Florida where the waters are just as blue but more transparent, like a sheet of teal glass. I had been hoping to meet someone in their forties, or maybe, fifties, to help me bury the youthful, yet sad-eyed visage of Josie Hurtzinwitz. Three weeks she’d been gone and here I was on the burning sand. Through my sunglasses, I peered at the two-dozen or so retirees sizzling like pink hot dogs. Their purple and gray hair, poodlish and chemicaled, dredged up memories of my mother, the late Doris Schliskey.
Doris, tough old girl (really unbearably stubborn and right about everything), was only one of two members to escape with her family’s name from Poland. Like an illicit package, she had been smuggled out in 1938, sent to the address of an old family friend in Liverpool where, if need be, Doris could pass as the genuine English article. Her brother Josef, however, had not been so blessed. With wiry hair and almost black eyes, he was the other survivor of the Schliskey name. I remember Uncle Josef as a tall, funny man who, no matter how much weight he gained, always had a skeleton’s gaze. Josef who said nothing about the War, and Doris who, year after year, told us in that low Polish murmur, “Don’t tell nobody you’re Jewish. This is why we don’t go to synagogue.”
Thank god I never had kids (another thing Josie had “evolved” her thinking on). In desperation, I charted a direct course to the water. I couldn’t fry all day without at least taking a dip in the lukewarm Gulf, maybe even swim a few laps to show the old ladies I still had the stuff. But once I got waist deep, a large fish floated by with a huge raw bite taken out of its midsection, perfectly semicircular as if the chomp through flesh and bone had been effortless. Suddenly, the water felt much deeper and darker. I was back on the beach without even having gotten my chest hairs wet. The ocean was dead to me, perhaps permanently, and amongst the women there were no real prospects. I scooped up my belongings (Coke and Crown Royal and some Robert Heinlein, mostly for effect) and hot-potatoed across the scalding beach toward the confetti of concrete buildings and billboards eating its way into the sand.
Back at the Lost Flamingo I watched some pay-per-view wrestling followed by a pay-per-view porn called Harry Cocker and The Sorcerer’s Bone. Somewhere around the Gryffindor orgy scene and the fourth whiskey and Coke, I realized I had made a mistake. If I were a younger man, I would chase after each woman who left a yawning blue day in my door. I would go out with a bang—a row of over-electrified marquee lights, festooning the name of some spectacular final show!… Instead, I chose to pack my bags. Josie always had the knack for planning vacations.
On my way out of town, the traffic was stalled for miles. From the other cars came fanning and perspiring whispers of a turned over 18-wheeler. I killed the motor and looked out my window. To the south, across the other lane, was the Gulf of Mexico, a silvery endlessness, writhing, wrathful, all-forgiving and all-ignorant. And to the north lay the massive maw of the grand American continent, waiting to swallow my bones into corn. How many years left, I thought, fifteen…twenty? That’s when I felt my passenger door swing open and slam shut with such force that I nearly banged my head against the ceiling of my Mercedes. I looked to my new passenger, half expecting to be mugged or threatened, or both, and saw an Asian girl, scrawny and scavenger-eyed, gazing in my side mirror. Her whole body trembled; she had no shoes, baggy sweatpants and a gray t-shirt many sizes too big with a fresh red spatter around the neckline.
“Uhh, now Miss,” she turned toward me for the first time, “I don’t know what you’re think—”
“Please,” she said between pants, “please help.”
“Help you? What do you want me to do?”
“Drive ot’er way.” And she pointed toward the empty stretch of highway blowing behind us.
“Look look, slow down. What happened? Did you have a fight with your boyfriend or—”
“Please—please!” She kneaded her hands, nearly shoving them in my face and crying, “Drive off now. He find me!” The reality of the situation reeked in her breath and weeks-old clothes, the giant t-shirt with the picture of some movie star pirate covering what was clearly the body of a young woman. And those eyes, too young to be so heavy, they slowly swung around, as if following the shadow of an eclipsing hawk. I looked ahead to a stocky, shaven-headed man limping down the highway and peering in the cars stuck in traffic. He walked with the truculent step of authority; only he didn’t look like any police officer I’d seen before. He had on a dark, featureless uniform, but there was no badge, no belt.
“You were in that accident up there, weren’t you?” She slowly nodded her head. “And you know that man?” I pointed to the 250 pounds of military-looking meat approaching my car.
“Master,” she whispered. Through all the fright, she was still beautiful: a poreless, ivory face and almond-shaped eyes with centers that were, surprisingly, almost green. I peered into those eyes and somehow saw Josie Hurtzinwitz’s hazel gaze staring back at me—that intense and furrowed brow whenever I complained about attending the annual charity banquets or wanting to shortchange (just a little) the monthly contributions to the ACLU. “Think of what your mother went through,” Josie would say, which was ironic because Mom loathed Josie in the beginning. “Too young,” she used to gripe, “just wants to be a trophy,” which was partly true, but she grew to like Josie, even love her, especially in the end, when things got really bad for Mom.
“You planned the accident?” I asked the young girl.
She shook her head. “No—fate.”
Fate—didn’t Uncle Josef say something about the Jewish people and that horrible word? Before I could finish my thought, the girl jerked her head forward, screaming and pointing: the man with the shaved head had spotted her and was marching toward us. I threw my sedan in drive and yanked the wheel all the way over. He was maybe ten feet away when I somehow maneuvered this big Mercedes out of the endless vertebrae of stopped cars. I just had to drive across the grassy median to get to the other side, but the bald brute punched his fists into the hood of my car, bared his yellow teeth. He took a step back, pointed at the girl and with his other hand reached for something at his waistline, or…that’s what it looked like. Microseconds blurred. To my amazement, my foot stomped the accelerator. The shaven-headed fellow didn’t get out of the way in time. I heard the shattering peal of the girl’s scream, and everything went red. I remember hitting a deer once when I was seventeen years old, that indelible crunch of bone against metal and glass. When my vision came back, he was in the air above the sunroof, whirling. In my rearview mirror, I saw him collide with the pavement where my sedan had been. I careered over the unmowed median toward the other side of the highway, the wild grass switching and snapping against us. We were now heading west, deeper into the dark-soiled heartland. I looked back and saw the large man facedown—a small crowd gathered. As we sped away, I kept him in my side mirror. He became a motionless dot surrounded by other dots, then disappeared altogether.
Sweat covered my forehead as I turned the moments over, one by one. Turn around, I thought, call the police, do something! But I kept driving, the hypnotic ribbon of highway unspooling in front of me. Faster and faster. Please god, I prayed, just let me get home and I’ll never vacation again. I looked to the young girl: her face burned with tears, and I saw there was more than just fear in that grimace—there was the germ of something much grimmer, something called rage.
“So this master fellow,” her sobbing quieted some, “he the guy we left on the road back there?” She said nothing. “Look, I know you got problems but you gotta start providing some answers, or else I’m going to leave you on the side of this goddamn highway. It’s not every day I run someone over.”
She swallowed hard, still staring directly ahead. “No, he work for master. Very mean,” and after a second added, “master have many girl. Too many.” She fidgeted with the drawstring of her baggy sweatpants.
“Many girls—what do you mean too many?”
She shivered, said nothing.
My god, I thought, were there going to be more than just police looking for me? The taste of bile boiled up in the back of my throat, and that ribbon of black highway that had been guiding us was starting to slither and morph in front of my eyes. I spotted a sign for a scenic overlook to the right and steered my car onto the sandy, unpaved road. The overlook was maybe a quarter mile from the highway, far enough not to be noticed. The parking lot lay cramped between a couple of monstrous, moss-covered oaks, of the kind that aren’t often seen near the beach anymore. There was enough space for my car and maybe three others, but it was just us. The elephant-sized boughs draped over everything else. I cut the engine, and she looked at me.
“What,” her face was still raw from crying, “why you stop?”
Without answering her, I got out of my car, leaving the door open in a daze, and surveyed the damage done to the front. A dented hood, smashed passenger headlight, the windshield a spiderweb of red fractures. Had I been driving that fast? Surely not. I briefly entertained the idea of insurance covering it (how absurd now) then came to my senses and sat on the ruined hood. After a minute, the girl got out of the car and stood by the side of it with her arms folded, staring at the beach with me. It was a breathtaking view of white sand against an infinite blue (the oaks shading us from sun). But there was something obscene about the tiny, manmade overlook, just a mound built up against the endless licking of the waves.
“You okay?” I finally asked.
She quickly nodded her head.
“Well that’s good…” I was still gazing at the unspoiled beach.
“What you look at?”
“What am I looking at?” Again, she nodded her head. “The future.”
“What you see?”
It was asked with a kind of innocence that I didn’t expect from somebody in her predicament. What did I see—in the future I saw my past. I saw Josie crying by my mother’s hospital bed, that regal brow that buried her eyes in sadness. “Why am I here with your mother every night, huh? Where are you—where are you?” My mother lying motionless there, dwarfed by blinking machines, tubes protruding from her gray body. I had checked out, Josie, that’s where, fallen back while you held her hand to make the tough decisions. But why didn’t I offer to help when you glared at me? Why did I feel, instead of pity, relief that after all those years the last energies of my mother were being squeezed out of her? What I told the Asian girl was: “Something impenetrably murky and full of death.”
“What?”
“Nothing…” Impossible to explain these things. “It’s just the Gulf.”
“Gof?”
“Yes.”
“Not ocean, not—” she struggled with the word, “Pah-sific?”
“You’re a long way from there, sweetie.”
“What?”
But I could tell she got the gist of what I meant, and her expression fell. After a moment, she approached a little closer, sat on the hood next to me and stared at the lapping of the water. “T’ank you,” she said.
I had never been thanked for running someone over before. I wanted to explain to her that that’s not the custom here—that maybe where she came from, we could speed away with our lives over some rugged, muddy roads. But not here. “You’re welcome,” was all that came out. Sometimes there’s nothing more eloquent to say. “So where’s home?” I asked.
“Laos.”
“Where?”
She repeated her answer.
Laos? Where was that country again—Southeast Asia somewhere (certainly no place Josie ever took us)? “Is it pretty there?”
She nodded her head vigorously, as if trying not to forget. “Yes, very pretty, very pretty.” She searched for the words: “Many mountain and…green.”
“Many mountain and green,” I repeated to myself, the only words she had in the English language to describe her home. One noun and one color, that’s home. The way she looked now was, I’m sure, nothing like her true self. The gold-toothed grin of the antihero pirate (what was he smiling about?), this giant t-shirt blowing in the wind like a sail. Really, she was small enough for that wind to pick her up and send her flying to the Caribbean. And you’d be the lucky one, I thought.
“What’s your name?” I finally asked.
“Chanmali.”
“Chanmali?” I repeated, putting a strong accent on the last syllable. She nodded her head. “I’m Mark.” I extended my hand, but she just stared at it like it was a cold fish (must not be their custom, I told myself). “We had better get back on the road,” I said, not wanting to explain to her why. But she understood.
We returned to the highway, and I continued west. The other side was even more blocked up now. What the living hell to do? The thought crept into my head: Josie would know. No—no way I could involve her; I didn’t even know where she was now. I was beginning to feel nauseated when Chanmali blurted out, “What’s de word?”
“What word?”
“For me,” and she spread her hands in front of her, keeping them still, as if to indicate more than just herself.
“For slavery?”
“No. Ot’er word.”
My mind was swimming in black, as she eagerly looked on. “I—I’m sorry. I don’t know.” She deflated, slouching back in her seat. But when she looked out the window, the stopped-up traffic jarred her memory. She tapped on the glass for me to see, eyes wide and green.
“Ah,” I said. “Human traffic.”
“Yes, right word,” she grimaced as if tasting something very bitter. “I am traffic.”
“Traffic,” I said to myself, “My god, you’re right. Where did you learn that one?” But she didn’t respond. I believe she was transfixed by the richness of all the automobiles united in near perpetual immobility, as if she’d never seen so many before, each like a jewel on an endless necklace. Then I noticed the blood spreading across my broken windshield. I thought about the girl’s tormentor, lying prone on the side of the highway. No doubt there were plenty of witnesses. Was I going to be wanted for murder, or just manslaughter? Should I turn myself in before I saw the fast red and blue lights screaming up behind me? Any minute now, I thought. Any minute…
“Where are we,” she asked, pointing at the cars out the window, “where traffic go?”
“The beach,” I said between gritted teeth, the noose of reality tightening around my neck. “They’re just going to the beach.”