Scott Cheshire - High as the Horses' Bridles

A buzzing at my waist; it was Dad.

“Hey, I was gonna call you again. I just called you.”

“Hey yourself,” he said. “I can’t talk.”

Another one in a rush. “Okay.” I put on my talking-to-Dad voice. “So, tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I’m fine.” He coughed. “I’m fine.”

“Well, Sarah says you’re not.”

“Your wife is making up stories.”

“Not my wife anymore,” I said.

“Ridiculous. No divorce lawyers in Heaven.” His attention must have been drifting, because his voice was getting lower, like he was talking to the room he was in and not to me.

“Well, maybe I should look at some plane tickets.” Pause. “Dad…”

He coughed again. “I told you, I’m fine. Call me later. Sundays, I get a little busy.”

“I’m headed to work.”

“A little work and a little bit of wine. Good for the soul!” he laughed out. He was all of a sudden louder now, like he was shouting into the phone. “Hey! Maybe I can show you what I got going? You should come out and visit us!”

I didn’t say anything.

“Josiah,” he said.

“Like I said, I’ll look for a ticket.”

“Hey! Josiah?”

“Yeah.”

“You eat yet?” he said. “I’m hungry. Tell your pretty wife you love her!”

“I’ll call you later, okay?”

Since the divorce, I’d asked Dad more than once to please stop calling Sarah. But he couldn’t sit back while I did apparently nothing. He’d say something like “Her blood will not be on my hands, but yours, Josiah, come the Final Reckoning.” He still absolutely refused to call me Josie. And I’d say something like “I understand, Dad, and your heart’s in the right place, I know that. But you should also know that Sarah is definitely not in agreement with this statement. And at least she’s respectful enough not to tell you this. You do remember she’s Jewish, right? Please tell me you remember she’s actually Jewish.”

“And what about you, do you think I’m wrong?”

I would then change the subject because I don’t answer questions like this.

After Mom died, and then the divorce, Dad started calling Sarah even more. She’d told me, the last time we talked, really talked — this was weeks before, twenty-two days to be precise — that now he was calling her late at night and poetically describing the weather back east. He was sharing his more recent and memorable dreams. I recall one of her favorites, Dad in a desert eating the book of Daniel. Dipping the pages in a bowl of melted butter, one by one. If Sarah and I had ever had children, I think, they would have found her postdivorce friendship with Dad a little confusing. I found it confusing. But for whatever reason he sometimes felt less comfortable talking to his own son about whatever the two of them talked about. Whatever; we were fine. I think Sarah pitied him, maybe even hoped in some weird way that if she were generous with him it would be good for me by extension. Or I liked to think so, anyway. When I reached Main Street, I stood there at the beach end, where I came to the realization that I’d never once, not once, explicitly thanked her for being so generous with Dad, even after we split, and I felt very shitty for it.

Amad was standing in front of the store, on the sidewalk. He was looking up and down the street, back and forth, probably looking for me. There weren’t many people about. Just before the long pier that juts into the Pacific, I saw a family of five. Two young girls and an even younger boy were having their picture taken. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. They were all standing by the iron statue of an otter balancing a ball on its nose. The boy was trying to climb its smooth metal back. He was probably about Issy’s age, or Issy’s age the last time anyone had seen him, anyway. But I didn’t think of him then, watching that boy only now. Isn’t that odd? Why not think of him then? Why not think of him always? “We should all be thinking of Issy.…” I thought of Sarah instead, and of our possible dinner, and made a dumb smile. I hoped the little boy wouldn’t fall off the statue and crack his front teeth, because I’d seen it how many times before. I’d also seen ancient photos at swap meets of nineteenth-century ladies in full-body bathing suits posing by that very same statue. Nostalgia can sometimes be dangerous. Otter was always a minor tourist draw, but tourists aren’t really people. They’re all toe bouncers, invariably looking for some manifest version of Heaven. Maybe tourism is a sort of sin, I think. Whereas Otter was the kind of benign sleepy town where kids leapt from the splintering docks, where locals fished in the big sun, leathering happily until they died.

Someone who looked like my neighbor Charlie came riding from the pier on a bicycle. A fishing pole balanced from under his arm and rested on the basket attached to his handlebars.

I waved and his middle finger rose, right on schedule.

Amad went back in the store.

Wooster’s, beside the main beach lot and across from the clock tower, was teeming with hollering swimsuited kids. Sodas in hand, they ran off in a dispersive sprawl into burning sand. In the parking lot, surfboards stuck out from back windows of cars and trucks, like knife handles, and the voices of young women flittered, sliding my way on the hot breeze. I walked toward the water, toward the floral-printed bikini tops and torn jean shorts. Their young feet and candy-colored nails, pale between sunburned toes scampered over the hot white powder. The girls jumped, laughing, into the white, hand-blocked light of the blue sky, flip-flops dangling from fingers. I scrunched my eyes, and they all half dissolved in a sun-soaked vision of volleyball, flickering in the screaming radiant light. I had to catch my breath. And a throng of runners, immaculate, numbers pinned to their chests, came padding up the concrete path, and I wondered where on earth they were going. This was southern California, land of perpetual health. The religiously healthy nearly naked everywhere you looked. The roads like clogged arteries, but nobody seemed to give a shit, bouncing along beside each other, breathing smog and briny smoke blowing inland from the ocean. I was feeling hungry and thirsty. And tired, because I’d always been a light sleeper, suffered from scary colorful nightmares as far back as I could remember, and while I no longer prayed before sleep like I did as a child, to keep the nightmares at bay I did sometimes close my eyes and ask that I might dream of Sarah running.

I saw the taco line was way too long. I was sure Amad was steaming.

The grilled fish taco at Wooster’s was not a thing for which I’d moved to California, but had I known the simple joy of it, I would have. Red cabbage slaw and a fresh corn tortilla. Hot peppers, radish, and a lime slice, squeeze your lime slices. Even for breakfast. This is among the most perfect things I’ve encountered on earth. On occasion, back east for business, I’ve even made pilgrimages to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens in response to reverent whispers, rumors of a Latin authenticity, of, say, a short Dominican couple serving chimichurri in the back of an El Camino. I was always disappointed. I originally went west, I guess, because of the simple fact that it was about as far away from New York as I could get without leaving the States. I was a young man running. I chose Otter because of Main Street, which was really just so charming, but also for its rough beach and the eroding rocks along the shore. This was a humbling place, beaten down by water and wind. I was supposed to be here. A spot of such natural and open mystery that it let me fill up with wonder, and not have to give that wonder a name. New York had become a land of secret corners and dark side streets, all man-made. Everything we make seems to fall down anyway. And of course I went to California for the women. Who was I kidding? For the quivery dream of young women, the lusty blur that fills you just before waking. Pink mouth and breast, the unhinged leg hovering just above dream, still inside the still-asleep bubble. Until morning sun fills a gauzy window; then gone. Girls of my teenage American wet dreams. Barbie-doll drivers of classic cars laughing in the saltwater wind. Of course, I found no such thing. Sarah was nothing like that. She had freckles on her forehead. Really not so unlike some romantic runaway from a midwestern farm filled with dreams of a brand-new birth, placenta snail-trailing as you first cross Sunset Boulevard, fresh off the bus, I left under the oldest American spell of all: I ventured west to begin …