Rick Moody - Right Livelihoods

South Beach, for those of you who are not familiar with our village, has a former military installation right nearby. The Fort, as this area is popularly termed, now houses members of the community who are in a more entry-level real estate echelon, if you get my meaning, and sometimes people are stuck here for many years, if they don’t have the advantages of a mattress fortune to fall back on, so to speak. There are any number of gun emplacements, now empty, facing the open sea, serving to keep tranquil the waters that lead to the major city to our southwest, whose strategic importance will be plain to see. One of the charming features of the Fort, however, is more in the category of adornment than in genuine military relevance, and that is the cannon at the Fort’s entrance. That’s right, a cannon, from the turn of the century. Ceremonial now, but not to be trifled with nonetheless. I think it is a useful memento mori for young people — who are always engaged in frivolities. The particular relevance is this: I was thinking of the cannon while I was doing the Dance of the Stick, and I began to become rather wild and suggestive in my dance. I was leaping gaily, in my poplin shorts, coming down like a Russian ballet dancer, to indicate that our cannon was firing and that many lives were being lost in this drama of national character. Then I licked the stick again, and the stick tasted peaty and it tasted serious, and what a delight for me, because it had been far too long since I had performed the stick dance last. Why had I denied myself this great and sensuous pleasure? For even if it was rather unconventional, even if my wife told me not to do these things, I felt giddy and I was beginning to spin, as though I myself were the shock wave moving outward from some cannon blast that scattered cavalry and foot soldiers and medics and little drummer boys and whoever else you might have found on a Russian battlefield. And just as I was reaching the crescendo of the Dance of the Stick, I found myself plunging down toward the shoreline and careening into the water, and, in a rather rude awakening, I found myself, well, swimming, or flailing, or flapping, in the seaweedy waters of the north Atlantic, completely immersed, at least briefly.

The beaches where I live, they are not of the highest quality. Those of you who are used to beaches where the sand is actually sandy, where the beach is an expanse on which you can recline, my humble resort town is not for you. Here the beaches are composed mainly of these perfectly round stones, each the size of a conventional softball, and the sandy part, well, it’s just some scarce feet at the water’s edge. The sand is mainly the action of the ocean upon these softballs. When a great storm comes up, it can erode most of the actual sand, so that there is no comfort at all for the preeners and tanners of the shore, in their skimpy little outfits. No comfortable patch on which to fling yourself in pursuit of the volleyball, no secluded rock inlet in which to have the occasional beach assignation, not at all. Our beaches are rugged, and South Beach is the worst of them. Thus, when I fell sideways into the great Atlantic, mindful of the obvious danger that I might be sucked out to Portugal, or farther south depending on the vicissitudes of the Gulf Stream, it was no doubt because of the rocky shore. I simply lost my footing. The fact that I was not feeling terribly well only added to my distress. My stick was flung from my hands, and a retriever happening upon the scene took up my stick and capered off with it into a thicket, where it chewed the stick to toothpicks. Nevermore would I taste the salty, peaty tip of that blessed baton.

And were it not for the water-safety ministrations of a person who effected my rescue, that might not have been the only thing I lost.

3. A Once Proud Men

When my wife and I were selecting this resort location for our vacation summers, we made our decision based on such factors as exclusivity, golf programs, cuisine, like-minded persons, and so forth. Never did we think to inquire about the livelihoods of the surrounding population. Of course, an important part of any resort community is its dependent populations. Though it is true, for reasons that escape me, that I am a well-known local character, I find that I am often in contact with the dependent communities, the various laborers in such areas as electrical wiring, plumbing, roofing, plastering, and lawn mowing. I find that I enjoy bantering with these persons, and they recognize that I am not a man of wrath but a man of love. I have only two settings on my dial. Thoughtfulness and joy.

Chief among the once proud men of our community are the fisherfolk. As you can imagine, here in a marine ecosystem, we ought to have a reliable subculture of fisherfolk, out there each morning hauling in the lobster traps or setting out the nets. However, because of poaching from the Nutmeg State, whose marine professionals are a lower class of people, our fisherfolk have found that they just cannot compete, and now many of them have gone on to other sorts of labor. What I am really pleased to report is that some of them have made the move into espionage. This is certainly an area where they can do a lot of good for all of us who are concerned about the national security picture, and, no doubt, they will still have a little time left to set a few lobster traps in the secluded inlets, just so that we’ll have something to eat on the big three-day weekends.

How do I know that the once proud men of our community are now embarked on this noble calling of espionage? Well, because of the gentleman who rescued me from the chilly north Atlantic on the morning in question. Let’s say his name is Ed Thorne, though this is not his name at all. I would be unlikely to give his genuine name in a report such as this, because it is a federal offense to give away the identity of an intelligence agent, and I would not want to appear frivolous in such matters. In any event, once the gentleman had successfully made sure that I was not in danger of drowning nor of choking on my own spittle, Ed Thorne, who was wearing the traditional hip waders of the surf-casting expert, sat with me for a moment and put aside his state-of-the-art fishing pole, which made my conducting baton look a little silly by comparison.

“Dr. Van Deusen,” he observed, “a little early for you to be out dressed like that, isn’t it?”

Indeed, I was trembling. Having been plucked from a watery grave by a fisher of men, I found that my hands were trembling as if I had some terrible neurological scourge, and I made an effort to conceal this from Ed by clutching my hands to myself. It’s possible that Ed thought nothing of my comportment. And yet in order to ensure that his attention was elsewhere, I noted that it was a marvelous morning, and I was pleased to be out frolicking in it, and late September was the most extraordinary time to be here on our island. See the gentle reds and yellows on the chokecherry and the ailanthus! See the birds on their migratory overflights! With my distended liver and some of the health hazards associated with that lamentable condition, I told Ed, I needed to take the pleasures remaining to me where I could find them. Ed was rather skeptical about my self-diagnoses, I suppose, but was not one to take issue with a man who has clearly made up his mind. We sat quietly, in the fraternity of early-morning risers. And our quiet was especially natural once Ed made clear that he had heard that my wife was involved in a prolonged house-to-house search for my whereabouts. He also let me know that he would be perfectly willing to help, by driving me to a secure location.

I was seized with a sentimentality about my wife. I did not understand why certain things kept happening to me and why I could not have a more stable home, in which I woke mornings and went to an office somewhere in the house, an office kitted out with the latest ergonomically designed office chair and a fax machine and some other devices with light-up dials, an office where I could work on my memoir about my years as a civil servant or perhaps a treatise on hybridizing chrysanthemums. I was appalling. The once proud men of my town seemed to have a lot more sense than I did. However, it was also possible that Ed was beginning to communicate with me in code. It’s important to be on the alert for the possibility of code. Listen carefully. Ed was gathering himself up; Ed was about to return to the activity for which he was noted, namely the entrapment of fish, but before he did so, he took pause, and this is when he said those immortal words, “You know, I saw something on the strange side yesterday.”