Page 32 of The Beachgoers
“Good.” His father does the same, taking a long breath. “Kept me alive in the jungles. There were times, shit. Times when the bombs and gunfire just exploded. When everything came crashing down on us, like what happened to you on that bike. Controlling my breathing controlled my mind. Prevented me from making some stupid move and walking right into the VC’s hands, or into my death.”
Jason rests his head against the seatback. But he doesn’t talk.
“Inhale,” his father whispers. “Through your nose. In, two… three… four. Hold, two… three… four. Exhale, two… three… four.”
Jason does. His chest rises. His body unknots. It’s visibly apparent.
“Again,” his father says. When Jason does, his father puts the car in gear and heads to the turnpike. “Exhale, two… three… four.” The car maneuvers the streets of tidy homes with country mailboxes and brimming flowerboxes and neatly trimmed walkways until they reach the turnpike. Here, those comfortable homes give way to warehouse stores and fast-food restaurants.
All the while, Jason breathes.
Every now and again, his father nudges him. “Two…three…four,” he whispers while driving. About a mile before the Hartford line, he glances at Jason again. “You sure you’re up for this, son?” As his father asks, he pulls into the breakdown lane and slows to a stop on the busy road. “Maybe it’d be better if you wait in the car,” he says when Jason looks over at him first, then ahead to the pavement glaring beneath the summer sun.
They both quiet as they get their bearings. The sight would quiet anyone, the way it still tells a violent story. Black streaks of faint skid marks crisscross the pavement ahead. Wilted bouquets of flowers hang limp where they’d been tied to the guardrail—in places where it’s intact. Because a section of that guardrail is crumpled from where the car that hit the motorcycle finally stopped. There’s a plain wooden cross, too, further down a ways. It’s off the shoulder of the road, hammered right into the dirt. Scrubby roadside grass has been clipped back around the rudimentary crucifix. It’s a sight no one wants to see. To imagine.
“I’m good, Dad,” Jason says. “Help me out.”
His father does. He comes around to the passenger side of the car, pulls the crutches from the backseat and then opens Jason’s door. The day is warm and there’s no way this plan will be easy. But he leans in and helps his son turn before Jason shifts his body to the edge of the seat and takes the crutches. Holding them in his left hand, he pushes himself up off the seat, stands and situates the crutches beneath his arms, then takes a step toward the pavement.
Meanwhile, his father is pulling on a pair of work gloves. “I still can’t believe your brother died, right here.”
“Let’s not go there, Dad,” Jason says over his shoulder. He’s wearing a short-sleeve button-down over cargo shorts, and his clothes hang loose on him—as though he’s lost weight. “If those dog tags came off during the impact, they’ve got to be here. Somewhere.”
“Could’ve travelled quite a distance, too, if they were thrown from Neil,” his father remarks.
Jason squints toward the gritty pavement again. “Let’s just get this done.”
And they try. Lord, do they try.
Father and son search through the roadside brush. Jason’s father brought a small rake. He combs it across the tangled weeds there while Jason stands and watches. He leans his weight on those crutches beneath the late-morning sun. Vehicles fly past on the busy thoroughfare: cars, delivery vans, construction vehicles. The stuff of a normal workday. Occasional horns blare at the two men, but they don’t even seem to hear. When large trucks speed past, a hot wind kicks up at them, bringing dust and grit to their faces, their skin.
But nothing stops them. Together, they walk and scan the curb. They inspect the breakdown lane. They’re looking for gray tags on a gray chain, lost on dirty gray pavement.
They’re looking for the impossible. The invisible.
When Jason grows fatigued, he half-leans, half-sits on the guardrail. Which is when his father sets the rake against the guardrail, too, and walks down a sloping grass embankment to a strip mall parking lot. Diligently, methodically, the man walks back and forth—up one row and down the next. Not a piece of trash is left unturned. Not a random parked car walked past without a searching glance beneath it.
The midday sun beats hot now. The traffic noise is jarring: the engines, the humming tires on the pavement, the speed. That wind from passing tractor trailers lifts Jason’s unkempt hair as he rests there on that guardrail. He’s really perspiring now, and drops his head back with a long breath. Seemingly using every bit of energy then, he lifts his crutches, gets them beneath his arms and pushes himself up. The white bandages—wrapped around his left shin and up over his knee—glare in the bright sunlight. He manages to shuffle a little to the side in the scrubby grass, stops and calls out to his father.
“It’s all right, Dad!” He watches as his father kicks aside an empty take-out coffee cup on the pavement. “Maybe he didn’t even have them on,” Jason yells.
When his father looks over at him then, it’s like he knows. That’s enough. Staying here any longer will be too much for his only remaining son. Jason just might drop with the weight of it all—the memory, the loss, the violence, the fatigue. So his father climbs back up the slight embankment, steps over the guardrail and squints down the heavily travelled four-lane road again.
“Well, those dog tags are nowhere else. Not at home, not at the funeral parlor,” he says to Jason beside him. “Neilmust’velost them here.”
Jason says nothing.
Does he know? Does he know how badly his father needs those dog tags? How badly he’s searching, searching? Does he wonder if his father’s searching for somethingelse, actually?
Searching for a way to turn back the clock, maybe?
Searching for answers?
Searching for proof that his son who died on the pavement might’ve had some comfort, some peace in his final minutes?
Searching for evidence that it’s all been one blessed mistake, somehow? That God above took someone from the wrong family that hot summer day? That Neil might be delivered back to them?
His father’s voice is low, then. And defeated. All fight is gone. “Inevertook those tags off in ’Nam. Not for one day.” He looks at his son. At what remains of his bandaged left leg. At his scarred face. “They got me through, those dog tags. And damn it,youneed them now, too,” he quietly insists.
