Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

Weekends, and the occasional weeknight when there was something the boy wanted to do with Finus instead of Avis, he had Eric with him in the place. And Eric loved coming to see him there, though he couldn’t understand why Finus wouldn’t move back home. Finus bought a radio, a nice wooden Motorola, and together they listened to local and national variety shows and the news broadcasts in the early evenings. They took walks in the quiet downtown and would stop in at the drugstore fountain for a Coke or ice cream. They took long drives in the country on the weekend days, just driving for long periods without talking much.

One late spring after school was out Finus took Eric on a boys’ vacation down to his family’s old beach shack out on the Fort Morgan peninsula. They threw their suitcases and floats for lolling in the Gulf swells into the 1931 Model B Ford four-cylinder car he’d bought new just a few years before, and rolled through Mercury just after dawn, climbed the high bluff road, and Eric turned in his seat to see the sunlight slanting in on downtown. He sat back down, and in a minute he looked over at Finus and said over the sound of the wind through the windows, — Only boys are allowed on this trip, Pop. Finus grinned and said, — That’s right, buddy. No girls allowed.

It was early June and so by ten o’clock the breeze coming into the car was hot and Eric’s cheeks flushed red as he laid his head down on the seat beside Finus and napped, his child’s lips parted, and Finus glanced down in wonder at how beautiful his little boy was, with his light blond hair and long golden eyelashes, his thin and delicate, perfect skin, faintly freckled across his small nose. He could hardly stand the idea that he had failed to make a good home for him.

Just before noon they stopped in Citronelle for lunch at a little roadside diner, and he and Eric pepped up with a Coke on ice and a hamburger apiece. They put the sweaty-cold Coke bottles on the table beside the glasses of ice, short little glasses with a roll in the glass near the rim, and Eric regarded it before he picked his up in one of his little hands and drank. Finus marveled at the boy’s fingers, so narrow and delicate at the ends, soft child’s fingers. There were moments such as this when he knew that he’d never love a soul like he loved this boy. Those moments when he could escape himself enough to know. All his life (he considered in such moments) he had imprisoned himself within himself, hardly aware of the world outside the small sphere of his terrible self-absorption. He did not consider himself to be a selfish man, a man incapable of caring for others, a man sleepwalking through his emotional life. But he was most often limited by an inability to see the world except through the dingy filters of self-conscious need. It was the most niggardly existence he could imagine, and he was filled with self-loathing and a desire to be some other way. To not be who he was. Which was akin (he thought at his most ironic) to some pathetic embodiment of the Old Testament Father: strong, selfish, jealous, vengeful, proud.

WHEN THEY’D EATEN he stopped for fuel at a station down the street, and they headed on.

Below Mobile the going was slower but the route prettier, through long flat fields of wheat, beans, and corn, till they crossed the canal. He took it slow down the old winding, wavy-surfaced, sand-shifting military road out the peninsula. By the time Finus stopped to let some air out of the tires for the sandy path from the road to the beach house, it was late afternoon, just in time for a late cooling-off swim in the Gulf.

He flung open the front and back doors and all the windows to let the Gulf breeze run through the screens. They stripped down and got into their trunks and went down the old splintery steps and Finus raced him to the water, let him win, and when Eric pulled up waist-deep Finus took him up and went out farther until the swells reached his chest, and he held Eric out and let him flail his arms at the waves. It was a calm day and there were hardly any breakers at all except right at the shore’s edge.

— Don’t let a jellyfish get me! Eric shouted.

— I won’t.

— Do you see a jellyfish?

— No, no jellyfish today. I see a shark there.

— Pop!

— Just kidding.

When they’d swum awhile they went back to the cabin and Finus got the ice chest from the back of the car and hauled it up the steps into the cabin and put on a pot of water and boiled the shrimp with some small new potatoes he’d picked up in Foley. When the shrimp had boiled he drained them and peeled them and set them out on plates with a sauce he’d made from ketchup, a little horseradish, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce, and he drank a cold beer with it, and they ate bread with the shrimp and potatoes, and he took his empty can and filled it mostly with cold jug water from the chest and poured a sip of beer in there from his own can and gave the water-beer to Eric. They sat out on the deck watching the sun go down in the water, two fellows having a good old time, and Finus wished every moment in their lives together could be like this.

BUT OH HELL the short of it was that in 1943 Eric was drafted into the army and shipped out to a training base in North Carolina. Finus and Avis both felt a little numbed by his absence, his infrequent letters, the sense that not only the reason for their (barely) surviving marriage but also the last medium for their animosity had disappeared. When they received word that Eric had died in a training accident at his base, never even sailed to France — or in the strange aftermath of it all — Finus felt almost as if their child had never existed, as if Eric’s whole life had been some kind of shared dream.

After the funeral, with military honors, Finus and Avis sat in her living room, he in the chair where he used to sit to have his bourbon and water at the end of a day. Avis was looking at him not with hatred or even plain anger, but with something more weary and resigned.

— I needed you, she finally said. -I did need you. I don’t know what it is in a man who seems to lose his feeling for someone, that’s if you ever really had it, as soon as that person really gives in and lets herself feel something for him. That’s what I think happened. She stared at him, waiting for a response. -What do you think? she said.

He tried to think, to respond to that, but it seemed his thoughts were just gears slipping, refusing to engage. His distraction was intimate and remote at once. He couldn’t really say what he felt.

— I think it’s more complicated than that, he finally said.

— I feel sorry for you, Avis said. -I used to think it was just that you fell in love with Birdie when we were only children, teenagers, and you never got over it. But now I don’t think it was just that. I think something in you makes it impossible for you to really love another person. God knows it’s a hard thing for someone like me to do, too, I know I’m far from perfect. But I think you’re worse, I’m sorry to say.

— Well maybe you had a little something to do with that, he said.

Avis said, very deliberately, — Go to hell.

He asked, this time, for a divorce, and again she refused. Something in her couldn’t give him that. He closed up the apartment above the Comet and moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, across the state line, took a job on the city desk. He drove from Tuscaloosa to Mercury to visit his parents once a month or so, but otherwise never went home. Attended his mother’s funeral in ’52. When his father died of a heart attack two years later, he quit the News , packed up, and went home to take up where his father had left off, with the Comet . Moved back into the apartment above it, nothing changed but the dust and two or three new creaks in the floors.