Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Hawkes-Mitchell said. “I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wait,” I cried. “Just one more question!”

Many points remained to be resolved. Why was our island now central to the Omega Force? Why had I happened to find Hawkes-Mitchell’s all-important piece of fiction on the porch of that house, when the Omega Force would have perhaps preferred that I never find the book? And why did the plot, here in the real world, feature woebegone individuals: a modernist architect, a German barmaid, my learning-disabled son, and an out-of-work surf-casting lobsterman?

I had my face in my hands. And I would have stayed that way for a while were it not that I suddenly felt Skip’s large, meaty palm on my clavicle.

I looked up into his soulful eyes.

“Shall we go for pizza?”

10. On Beach Parties and International Disarmament

There was only one venue on the island for that popular culinary item known as pizza pie, and that was the bar named Dumpling’s. A dangerous location, Dumpling’s, and not simply because of the presence there of sodium and trans fats. Sinister characters lurked in the margins of Dumpling’s. They nursed lethal intoxicants meant to prove, through ingestion, their ability to survive anything, any degradation or humiliation at the hands of the affluent. I should not have gone into Dumpling’s. I was not dressed properly, for one. In any kind of scuffle that would result from our presence, Skip and I were sure to fare poorly. Neither of us was terribly strong, nor were we schooled in the proper sorts of self-defense techniques.

Additionally, my wife had taken the car. And I had given the domestic help the afternoon and evening off. There was no recourse but to walk to Dumpling’s, and as we went, I held tight onto the arm of my son to steady myself. I am sure that in Skip’s view this amounted to a noble responsibility, being able to guide his old father along in the world. As we walked, we played the rhyming game. That is, I allowed Skip free rein with respect to this peculiarity of his character. I would select a word, like storm, and then I would challenge Skip to come up with the greatest number of possible rhymes. Swarm, warm, dorm, and the dazzling fungiform . I even allowed Skip to use the ersatz rhyme of orn, so naturally he scored heavily with warn, torn, scorn, mourn, and, to my horror, porn.

I’d left my goodly wife a note explaining where we had gone, so that when she returned on the late boat she might find us, but it was my belief that by the time she reached Dumpling’s we would be well on our way to meet Ernest Piccolo.

I was glad to behold the expanse of bottles in Dumpling’s. I loved the way these mixables were arrayed, like the tiered dancers on a Busby Berkeley riser. Always in front of a mirror too, so that their tableau would be twice as seductive. I kept as far away from the bar as I could get. I installed my son by the foosball table (I believe this is the name of the game) because he was inordinately fond of foosball, as I had found on a previous visit, ruse ball, brews ball, Jews ball, and I hustled to the bar quickly to lodge our order. I carried back a lamentable seltzer water with lime while we waited for our french fries and other salty preliminaries. I could taste the moment of hypostasis, I could taste the ousia of drink, even at this distance from the bar, the way in which all mystery would be made comprehensible. Who knows but that I would have weakened right then and there — as we picked lazily at our french fries and Skip eyed the foosball table lustily — if a staff person in Dumpling’s, someone unknown to me, had not begun shouting for no fathomable reason. This crusty publican was outraged about some patron sitting near to us, but I could not identify the offending individual. “You got a lot of nerve coming into this place! Some people got a helluva lot of nerve!” Initially, I feigned ignorance about the disturbance, as did many others. I searched discreetly for the target of the aggression, but in vain. The ripostes only amplified. “All a man like you does is lie around like you couldn’t be bothered to—”

Soon there was another fellow with him, an apron-wearer, and they were walking toward the section of the establishment reserved for those of us dining. I believe the apron-wearer was cleaning a knife on a rancid dishcloth. Without further delay, I took hold of my son’s hand, and I told him that we needed to change venues immediately. I told him, in a tumble of words, that we needed to hurry now, that there were treasonous elements everywhere around us, enemies of the state, and it was no longer safe to be in Dumpling’s, especially in light of the altercation that was almost certain to take place. I told Skip that we would have the pizza delivered, and we could microwave it, and it would taste just as delicious as if we got it right here, fresh from the brick oven.

There was some bushwhacking to do. There were some back roads and some clambering through the boxthorn and blackthorn, until we were again at the water’s edge, beholding the drama of the swells. It wasn’t so far. The moon was on the rise, despite the storm that was predicted in the marine band forecast. The thick humidity of early autumn was an oracle of summer’s undeniable last gasp. Through hurricanes does summer relinquish its grip. With a little more hardship, we would step from the overgrowth behind the house of a certain mergers and acquisitions specialist and into the moon-light. That is, we soon found ourselves on Carson’s Bluff, a spot of gentle dunes a mile or so beyond the end of the golf course, and as we overlooked the lip of the land, we could see that the waves had grown unruly and restive. We threaded our way down an eroding path, catching on to dune grasses to avoid plummeting to our deaths below.

In the distance, a robust beach fire flickering. A bona fide beach fire of the sort that the neighbors’ kids used to have once or twice a summer, getting into whatever trouble they got into. Of course, I worried that this beach fire not only was unsafe but constituted a security breach in the matter of our objectives. For if one of the beachcombers from the gathering was hiding out in the nearby brush, it would be virtually impossible for me to keep this individual from recognizing that a high-level exchange of information was about to take place. Unless I neutralized him or her. As I was thinking this thought, I was disturbed by another interloper on the scene, perhaps an attack dog! A pit bull or a German shepherd sent to menace us! I distracted the hound by pulling on the stick in its mouth, which prompted it to yank back, growling ominously. I could tell that my technique, disarming it with play, had won over the attacker, because its growls had now given way to a relentlessly wagging rump end.

The stick, of course, was a perfectly shapely and sea-worn example of Atlantic driftwood, the kind of stick that may have been thrown into the sea and fetched out by dogs like this for decades now without ever having been chewed to saliva-moistened bits. Skip and I were trying to persuade the dog to return to its masters, but it was having none of it. Instead, it expected us to cooperate in this ceaseless throwing of the stick. Skip was about to oblige, though he didn’t throw very well, but something in me steadied his arm. I took the stick from him. I could feel it overcoming me, that humiliating need. Now was not the time for the Dance of the Stick, with all that was upon us: an amphibious landing by the Omega Force, intent on commandeering the island for a multipronged assault, a shock-and-awe-style assault on multiple military targets in the environs. The Omega Force was aware, no doubt, of the presence on our island, at least during the months of summer, of a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a deputy director of Homeland Security, likewise numerous members of the party in power. Each forking path of possibility had been duly accounted for by them. There was no time for the stick dance, and yet I felt an inability to sit still or to think clearly. Still, I didn’t want Skip to witness me in the middle of what was certainly, at best, an eccentricity and at worst a sign of some nervous disorder that I had never quite eradicated despite years of treatment.