Send Down the Rain(24)
I was nauseous, my vision was blurry, and my head was splitting. The last thing I remembered was Allie’s hand grabbing my arm as I stood between her and her dad. Mr. Billy had broken my jaw with the Mason jar, and surgery had wired my mouth shut. When I tried to speak, my words sounded all garbled, making Allie recoil and cry even more. I motioned for a pad and paper and, struggling to write with a split middle knuckle on my right hand, scrawled Milk shake?
Allie smiled, and the tears that had been hanging in the corners of her eyes cut loose and trailed down her cheeks. Two milk shakes later, she curled up in a ball next to me and slept. Throughout all of this, Bobby had been sitting quietly in the corner of my hospital room. He never said a word. I would find out later that he pulled Mr. Billy off of me and bit off the top of his ear. Which explained both Bobby’s puffy black eye and the odd shape of Mr. Billy’s ear.
When I asked my mom about the split skin on my knuckle, Mrs. Eleanor said I’d made it up the lattice with a crescent wrench in one hand. When Mr. Billy came at me, I knocked out his front teeth with the wrench and threw one good punch before he turned out my lights.
Mr. Billy spent ninety days in jail, which sobered him up but did little to erase the debt no one knew about. With great contrition he returned home, but the damage had been done. If a little girl is born with a hole in her heart that only her father can fill, Allie’s had been permanently closed. Mrs. Eleanor had had enough, so Mr. Billy moved into one of the honeymoon cottages on the property and helped his wife run the business from there. They remained married, but I doubt the two were ever affectionate after that.
These events, and the ripples that resulted, created a wedge between Bobby and me. We were quickly learning that the world we lived in valued knights who stormed the castle. Got the girl. Rescued the city. Bobby was a boy like the rest of us. He desperately wanted to be a knight. He just wasn’t any good at it. And when he tried, everyone let him know how miserably he failed and how immensely I succeeded. I compared myself to everyone. He compared himself to no one. I was constantly trying to be “better than.” Bobby was constantly trying to be “with.”
In 1964, the stop-motion animated Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted. It was a good picture of our life. I was ever the young buck off at reindeer practice, showing all the other bucks how well I could fly and fight. “Pick me, pick me, pick me . . .” Bobby, on the other hand, had been banished to the Island of Misfit Toys.
I used to lie awake at night and listen to Bobby cry in his sleep. While we could not have been more different, one thing was true for both of us—pain had rooted in the middle of our chests. I medicated mine with the drug of competition. Fast cars. Bravado. Bobby medicated his with the drug of offending no one.
As the distance between us increased, Bobby began hanging out with the island crowd. The unaccepted who accepted him.
I hung out with one girl.
14
The Blue Tornado had been an icon on the west coast of Florida for over sixty years. The walls inside were covered in photos of Allie and her mom with famous A-list actors who’d flown in from California to Europe just to eat here and walk what was routinely voted Most Beautiful Beach in the US by most every travel magazine.
I pulled into the parking lot to the realization that a lot had changed since I’d last been there. The restaurant looked as though it hadn’t been open in months. The boarded-up windows and doors, faded and chipped paint, and half dozen No Trespassing signs suggested Allie was no longer serving the best seafood anywhere and wouldn’t be anytime soon. Rosco and I walked around, one of us looking and the other sniffing, but other than a few footprints of people crossing the property en route to the beach, there was no sign of life.
A pattern of rusted nails was the only remnant of the fifty or so picnic benches that once populated the porches. A couple of floorboards were missing, exposing the sand dune beneath. Deep grooves were all that remained from the sixty rocking chairs that previously lined the front porch to help alleviate the discomfort of the average two-hour wait. Rusted eye hooks screwed into the rafters above looked naked absent the swings that once hung there. The takeout window had been covered with a sheet of plywood on which someone had spray-painted Trespassers will be shot in blue paint. I peeked into a side window and was amazed to find the kitchen had been stripped bare. Either stolen or sold, not a single stainless piece of equipment was in sight. No fridge. No fryer. No sink. No grill. Only dangling and disconnected exhaust pipes, frayed wires, and cut water lines. On the other side of the building, somebody had cut a hole in the wall of the kitchen big enough to drive a truck through.
I went back to my oceanfront motel a mile down the road. My second-floor room offered a breeze and panoramic view of the beach for several miles in either direction. For dinner, Rosco and I split a can of Vienna sausage, a can of sardines, and a pack of saltines. At nine o’clock I pulled a chair out onto the walkway, leaned against the wall next to my air conditioner, propped my feet on the railing, and stared down on the waves rolling up on shore just below me. I adjusted the radio antenna, thinned out the static, and attempted to dial her in, but the signal was still too weak. A few more minutes and the AM signal would clear up. It was only six o’clock in California. I checked my sugar, gave myself a few units of insulin, and laid my head back against the concrete block.
AS HER SHOW REACHED a certain level of success, Suzy began calling more of the shots. About ten years ago she’d built a studio in the barn of her California farm just north of Malibu. Hosting a nightly show while staring out across the Pacific. Not a bad gig. She played a healthy variety of most every kind of music known to man. People tuned in because they loved the sound of her soothing, raspy, understanding, empathetic, easily animated voice, and they called in their heartfelt questions because of her uncanny ability to listen and offer sage advice. Given her style and intimate, wrap-you-in-her-arms sound, a lot of callers asked her to marry them. Sight unseen. They’d propose on the air and she’d laugh and play along, and then dig deeper and try to figure out what hole they were trying to fill. She was brilliant.