Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

Skip was beginning to shiver.

“Want to wear my jacket?”

Skip shook his head dramatically. I forced the jacket on him. A man who knew what I knew could not afford to be wrapped up in outerwear. And then I took off my loafers. It was easier to walk in the sand without them. The seconds passed interminably. No fisherman appeared on the shore. Was it true that there was no choice but to make our way over to the beach party? To do reconnaissance in that area? It seemed there was no choice. The attack dog chaperoned us.

Did I recognize those urchins of the neighborhood? Urchins no longer. They were the mostly grown children of privilege. Grown children who had never known a day of being short for change in their lives. They carried no cash. Grown children whose hair was perfect, whether combed or disarranged, from the moment they were expelled from the womb, and who seemed to know, even then, exactly how to ski, exactly how to do that nonsense on the surfboard with the sail on it, whose gift for repartee, even in their twenties, would exceed mine over the whole of my tired life, who would succeed effortlessly in lives that would be noteworthy for an absence of self-reflection despite reversals, illnesses, or death. Their mysteries were so buried that they were inaccessible even to themselves. As the fashions of the years turned, these young people remained unaffected, unperturbed, and by virtue of their lack of interest in the goings-on of the world, as perfectly lovely, as luminously beautiful and purposeless, as the hosts of heaven.

What was unclear, as I gazed around at the group of them, all delinquent from classes at the colleges in the area in preparation for a long weekend, was whether or not they were collaborators . Would collaborators be making the campfire dessert known, Skip helpfully pointed out, as the s’more? Because amid their other nefarious activities, about which I had as yet not enough information to surmise, there was the preparation of this dessert. It could just as easily have been some explosive preparation, gelignite or TNT, who knows, and maybe these supplies had been secreted away when the scouts had given word of our approach. For the moment it was the s’more, prepared in the traditional way with stick, marshmallow, graham cracker, chocolate bar.

I was immediately hailed by name. “Dr. Van Deusen,” one of the young men called to me. Did I know him? Whose son was he, and why did he look so much like so many other people? Like sons who had perhaps by now grown up and had sons themselves, in some eternal return of Anglo-Saxon reinheritance. He could have been anyone on the island, and that alone made it impossible to establish his intentions. “Care for a beer, Dr. Van Deusen?”

As any espionage agent will tell you, it’s important to be able to blend in with the indigenous cultures, and if this means garroting a one-legged prostitute in Bangkok in an effort to establish that you are not sentimental and are willing to take risks, then you will have to garrote that hussy and pray to God that you will be forgiven. Accordingly, while attempting to fathom the purpose of this so-called beach party, I had no choice but to partake of the local grog and to attempt, at least in brief, to make nice with our hosts.

I introduced Skip, and I was asked if Skip would like a beer too. Though Skip was beginning to go gray early just the way his father had, with a full head of hair that would need to be carefully treated with some masculine dye, we did not permit him to drink alcoholic beverages. It only confused him. I demurred on Skip’s behalf, to his disappointment.

From the first sip of the beverage, I realized that these were not such bad kids after all! In fact, maybe they weren’t such carbon copies of their stuffy parents as I believed them to be! Maybe there was a little something going on in there. A little understanding of the complexities of the world. Perhaps they were able to understand that everything that was so felicitous to them, their way of life, was about exclusion, and that this precious exclusion, in which they got to romp on the beach with the same kids with whom they went to their preparatory schools, was something that they needed to defend somehow, whether through public service or through the participation in the foreign bureaus of the Central Intelligence Agency or similar organizations.

The youngsters, they now informed me, had been about to undertake a certain drinking pastime. According to this game, one either had to answer a question with a revealing truth about himself or else he had to drink. The youngsters now revealed that there was a rather powerful punch lying in a cooler not far distant, just beyond the merry light of the bonfire, a punch that had some preposterous name such as From Here to Eternity. The drinking game was already under way, and there were already some bodies lying around. Whether in the midst of premarital fornication or unconsciousness was hard to know. Perhaps there had been a ritual poisoning or perhaps powerful sedatives had been stirred into the beverages by malingerers in an effort to sideline various parties in the military battle to come.

More pressing, in a way, was the rule that in certain circumstances the players were required by the drinking game to embrace or even kiss one another. I pointed out to a young blond fellow with a backward baseball cap (and one of those preposterous necklaces) that this was a requirement from which I needed to be exempted, by virtue of advanced years. The towheaded son of the president of one of the country clubs, I believe, whose name was D’Arcy, said that this should elicit no worries, because I could always just drink some more.

I reluctantly assented. D’Arcy again asked if I didn’t want Skip to play.

“He’s very sensitive about things like this. And at any rate, he’s more interested in rhyming games. He’s a demon for rhymes.”

A young woman who had been sitting on the far side of one of the enormous logs on the beach appeared from the shadows and demanded, with a sloppy grin on her face, a demonstration of Skip’s rhyming skills. Skip sat quietly at my feet, looking out at the ocean, since the sound of waves often pacified him.

“Skip, my boy,” I asked, shaking him, “can you give an example for the good people of a rhyme for the word orange? ” This was a trick question, of course, because there are no perfect English rhymes for orange, as Skip had properly observed on many occasions.

“No rhymes,” Skip said darkly. “Change, mange, short-range, strange, arrange, derange, estrange, exchange, shortchange.” And then he got stuck on mange for a while and kept whispering it to himself.

A contestant, Meghan was her name, was asked by the moderator for a penetrating truth about herself, and she admitted that she’d cheated on every test in geology, a required course in her core curriculum. This was not considered a penetrating truth, and Meghan laughed gaily as she swigged another dram of From Here to Eternity.

Let me pause briefly to observe that Omega Force: Code White by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell has the requisite stunning reversal in its last chapters, and this I learned by borrowing one of the multiple copies of the book from the shelves of our tiny island library after I had mislaid the earlier, purloined copy. Why would there be multiples of such a book on our island? Let us leave this question aside for the moment. The stunning reversal in the Hawkes-Mitchell tome is as follows: Ernest Piccolo, the astringent detective at the heart of the saga, it is revealed, has all along been in cahoots with the Omega Force. That the book shifts abruptly from Piccolo’s point of view to the point of view of a small-town lawyer named Bonnie Peebles is one of the few unusual features in what is basically hackwork, and it enables Piccolo’s betrayal of Peebles, notwithstanding his claim to have fallen in love with her after a grand total of two romantic evenings; Piccolo waits until they are on the verge of landing on Plum Island in their stolen Coast Guard launch, and then he puts his.38-caliber wheel gun to her head and tells her that since she’s the only one who is in possession of the real story, she’s the one who’s going to have to die.