“Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”

Abraham Lincoln Lincoln’s Own Stories
16th president of US (1809 – 1865)

Matthew, Matty (Poop) Skyles was born in the spring of 1970 in the Little Duck Key hospital, just outside of Marathon Key. I know because I was laying there squealing bloody hell like the newborn I was right there in the same nursery. My name’s Jimmy Scranton and I suppose me and poop have been best friends ever since. Longer than I can remember anyway.

We’re what you call natives around the Keys and the circle of folks that can honestly still say that are getting smaller and smaller each year. We were pretty lucky; Matty and me. We’ve seen the Keys as they were and looked on them with the innocent wild eyes of children in the 70’s and 80’s; when this little turquoise blue, emerald green part of the world really was paradise. Not the paradise I see plastered up on cute little mailbox’s and silly little restaurant’s called “Paradise Grill” or “Little Conch Paradise Smokehouse.” Nope, I’m talking about actual island hoppin, lobster stabbin, snapper catchin and anything else fun you can think of to do on the water in the tropical balm of summer and winter type paradise.

Lemme give you a typical day in an actual paradise growing up here in these warm rich waters. First, it always, and I mean always, had something to do with the big beautiful half Caribbean/half Atlantic/half Gulf of Mexico Ocean we have down here; all littered with uninhabited (then) little cays and sand-spit keys with cool names.

Names like sugarloaf key, Chub Cay, Boot and Big Torch Key, Snipe landing, Sombrero Light and a million others that we would just make the names up as we went along and then forgot them so we could make up another one the next day. It was like being a pirate! We all had little runabout boats growing up and Matty’s dad got him a fine one; nice little 26 ft Grady White and we’d spend all day doing one of three things:

Fish

Go Bugging

Or work the shoals and breaks for bait.

The fishing part was pretty easy. Up at the butt crack a dawn and hustle up some bait; goggle-eye if they were running, mullet in the fall cause they were thick as thieves or sardines if it was in the blast furnace heat of summer. If bait was scarce, as it could get once in awhile back then but happens all the damn time now, we’d simply run around in the boat through the canals until we spotted one of the neighbors out on their dock and holler up if we could grab a few dozen outta their wells if they had cages dropped and full in the water. If you had bait you always shared when asked, course the payment was a few fillets or tuna steaks later in the day from the borrower. After that shits pretty simple. Head offshore and run to the hump or Mann’s Point or any one of several dozen spots and look for birds to show the way to the tuna, or dolphin (Mahi Mahi) and wahoo or if God shined down, a big beautiful marlin to play with for a few hours. Course you don’t keep billfish, that’s just for the sport and if you weren’t really rigged for them they’d break the line pretty quick anyway. So we’d go looking for the fish, catchem up, put em in the box and head on back to the dock for some grillin. Or if the big boys weren’t eating that day, after awhile we’d head into the shallows and rock piles and crush some grouper or yellowtail snapper or mutton’s. Sometimes if we were feeling like being lazy we’d take the electric reels out and just deep drop for the tile fish and red-eye snappers that lurked in those cold deep reefs several hundred feet down. Easy-peezy man. Sounds like a nice day doesn’t it?

Now bugging was only legal a few months out of the year but back then-hell-nobody much cared when you went. All that entails is doing a slow troll at night, big flashlights searching the dark shallow water until their lights would show up like two little teeny diamonds and then someone would jump in head first with his gig stick while somebody else killed the engine (for safety) and you’d just kick on down to the rock the little fucker was hiding under, rope the little bastard with the gig stick and pull em out. Swim on up to the surface, hop aboard and toss that juicy little Florida Lobster right into the bucket with his friends.

Poop and me would do that a lot just by ourselves, sometimes Goose and Billy’d go with, especially when we all got older but the baiting was something only me and him would do.

It was his idea actually. Matty is a thinker if nothing else and he was always industrious. He figured we could make some good money catching bait for all the other fisheads, especially the charter guys who’s income depended on their customers catching fish so when we’d need some cash for gas and later for gas and beer we’d spend the whole damn day working the water with our cast nets,or sabiki rigs if sardines were around, and sell them bad boys all over the islands. Just go from canal to canal, dock to dock and marina to marina pulling bait outa the big fifty gallon live well he had on that Grady and we’d be set for a week or two. Kids can’t really do that now. They’ve got laws, registrations, regulations and all against that kind of thing.

But back than we were something I’ll tell ya. Bunch island boys, lanky and always tan from the sun and salt having times. Ya mon, we sure would have some times. Matty used to call us Renaissance Men on a reign of terror! He’d say it funnier than hell too; “..reeeeign of terror!” was how he’d say it and we’d all start laughing our butts off.

He could be a terror to when he wanted to, when he needed to, and I guess we were all pretty much fearless back then but Matty, that kid had a way of stepping in it all the time.

We came across a bunch of tourist kids one day, they were older; bout six of them, and they was just beatin the crap out of little Johnny Mafood. Johnny was a Jamaican kid, his folks were poor and Johnny was small for his age, plus he talked with that strange Caribbean accent. Easy target for a bunch of morons cause there’s hate everywhere, even in paradise. So we come across this half dozen kids wailing on poor Johnny, calling him all kinds of stupid ass names and Matty didn’t even hesitate. Before I knew it he launched himself into that scrum and started hitting anything that wasn’t black and dreadlocked. I was kinda committed after that and every last one of them tasted our knuckles before it was through. We both took a pounding but poop got the worst of it. Pretty bad actually; broken nose, busted his right hand, but after awhile those kids lit outta there with their tails between their legs. Problem was a few of them tourist kids had some pretty rich parents and word gets out pretty quick in these parts. People, other locals, started saying “troublemaker” and “white trash” (Matty’s folks lived in a trailer out by sugarloaf) in the same breath as Matty. Those kids told their folks Matty Skyles jumped em and started the whole fiasco; didn’t seem to matter the truth was he was just helping out a kid in a six to one fight.

Then there was the time me and Matty, Maggie Collins and Isie Hollis were all hanging out at Isie’s house. We’d had some beers and were sitting on the dock out back, watching the southern moon sprawled out on that canal water and things got the way things get when hormones are moving through you like the Gulf Stream. Matty and Isie started mashing and after awhile me and Maggs left to, well to kinda go find our own little spot to do the same thing. Isie’s dad, Carl Hollis came home and discovered Matty’s tongue wrapped around his little girls’ tonsils and about blue a fucking blood vessel! Ole Carl Hollis owned a whole lotta property around the islands at that time and he cast a pretty large shadow; over the town and in his own family and before you could say boo all of a sudden Matty Skyles is some sort of lurking pervert; ready to pounce on young girls virtue at a moments notice. I know Isie tried to stand up but once people like Carl Hollis started saying things is like this, in parts like these, there isn’t a lot you can do about it. Poor girl never stood a chance.

It got worse to as we got older. That’s when the snowbirds really started rolling in like an avalanche of god damn Hawaiian shirts and socks with sandals. I blame it on Jimmy Buffet and his freakin cheeseburgers in Paradise.(But that’s another story.) They started pouring down from New York and Philly, Chicago and Atlanta looking for their little slice of paradise. We both got jobs working the charter boats so not only would we have to rub elbows with all these masses of khaki shorts and sunscreen but we’d have to teach the ignorant bastards how to fish! And if they didn’t catch enough by their asinine calculations they wouldn’t tip!

I mean, we got by, me and poop but it was frustrating; we’re waiting in line for tables at dive’s we used to be able to just wander half drunk into and sit down for a nice grouper sandwich and a beer. And they started staying too. All these people with all this money and not a thread a manners among them. They’d say, “Well shit Gloria, look at that lovely little beachfront there. Perfect place for a nice big condo now is it not?”

Well money rolls I guess don’t it? And it rolled like a rogue wave into these parts; in a few years we had more people down here than we had sand, condo’s throwing up shadows on some of the best tarpon and bait lagoons and shoals we’d spent so many hours on as kids. I guess the whole thing started wearing Matty down. We’d always been drinkers; what in Christ’s name goes better with some nice snapper and lobster than a few dozen cold ones and some rum drinks? Well, he started drinking quite a bit and not just like we’d always done before, with a reason and all but just because I don’t think he had much better to do. Started getting in fights with snowbirds and local’s alike, sometimes about nothing and sometimes about something. Like the time some jerkoff named Goldstein started yammerin about how all these “uneducated, foul mouthed locals couldn’t even manage to do the landscaping correctly” at his brand spanking new slice of blue-haired condo paradise. So Matty said something I’m sure was not very welcoming and they ended up on the floor of the “Prime Catch” bar throwing insult and skin at each other.

Then early last year Matty and Celia Barton managed to get themselves preggers. Now Celia’s a peach but her old man wasn’t all that pleased with his daughter carrying around the seed of what most folks around here consider a cross between the devil’s spawn and James Dean. And I don’t mean the cool James Dean; I mean the one that had no direction, the one that stole women into the night, the one that died because he was stupid.

And that put a lot of pressure on poop. He loves Celia, he loves her crazy and he’s got his pride, like any man has. Well he wasn’t going to be supporting them and their little baby by mating on charter boats, all we’ve both ever done is work and play on the water and the only real paying type jobs around here are construction. And for the love of irony most of the construction round here is being done by one Mr. Carl Hollis so even if Matty had any actual experience at it he’d be shit out of luck.

Celia was working for as long as she could at the Pirates Cove; one of the new restaurants that seem to open up with every wane tide, but with the baby coming she had to cut that out about a month ago so money was getting really, really thin. Matty knew some guys, like we all do, that were running weed up through the straits and down into some of the smaller keys and he got to thinking about how easy that money would be. Me and him both know every back water, every hidden shoal and every unmarked cove from Islamorada to Key West. He knew he could run wide open on that Grady without running lights all night long if he had to. Plus half the damn Coasties know him from still spending three quarters of his time on the water so even if a cutter came up on him he could most likely talk his way out of it. I didn’t like it. I told him I didn’t like it but once an idea pops into his head he’s never been one to back off it until the wheels fall off; good or bad.

Well he ran into the other half of the Coast Guard. They didn’t know him and even if they did, who knows, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. So know Matty’s sitting in the sheriff’s cooler in Marathon, baby on the way and waiting on federal charges to be filed in a little necklace of island paradises where finding a handful of people to say one good thing about him is gonna be a stretch.

Of course, when the time comes, I’ll say all I can good about Matty Skyles. I’ll sing it from the god damn rafters if it’ll do any good; but I know it most likely won’t. What I can’t tell them, what won’t matter one bit are some of things I know about my friend.

Like the time he ran headfirst to defend a little Jamaican kid he barely knew.

Like the time he got called a pervert by some fat ass big shot who was lying through his teeth when he said it.

Like the time we were spear fishing and I got hit by a Barracuda. Stupid thing, me still wearing my watch down there; Cuda ain’t mean but they sure as shit are fast, stupid and have a mouthful of teeth. Ripped my hand to ribbons and we were half a mile offshore with a strong current blowing out. He swam me back, fixed me up as best as he could and carried me on his back two miles to the same hospital in duck key we were born in.

I’d like to tell them about the time he found Larry Peters wallet down on the beach. Had a shitload of cash in it, I mean it was loaded. Matty didn’t even ring the bell; he just dropped that wallet into the mail slot in their door and never touched so much as a dollar of it.

I’d like to tell em about a lot of things regarding my friend. I’ve known him thirty eight years and I’ve never seen him do a mean thing. I’ve seen him do stupid things, lots of them but never a mean thing and very much more often than not somebody had something coming to em and he’d walk away. I’d tell him we’re just two native boys trying to live, trying to make it down here because living anywhere else wouldn’t be thinkable. I’d say that God Damn it, we’re just trying to find our own little piece of paradise.

I guess maybe ole Don Henley was right; you call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.

The old money families of the City all shared three basic things in common. The mostly summered in Martha’s Vineyard or at the Cape. They were peculiar in secret, hidden ways and the men of these families always married first rate women, who went on to bare and raise (with the often overwhelming help of nannies and nursemaids) first rate boys and girls. The Thurber family was no different and it was now, while Milton Thurber sat alone on his porch overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in late May, after an afternoon bridge game with the usual suspects, that this third birthright was giving him a considerable amount of troublesome thought.

He took a long, thoughtful pull on his martini and read, for the fourth time, the letter in his had explaining to him that his youngest daughter who, although in her final year at University, had been regretfully expelled for what was innocuously called “ ..violation of moral code.”

It had arrived this afternoon with the bank and broker statements and he hadn’t yet shown it to Abigail, his wife of thirty two lackluster, predictable years, who had gone into town to shop or gossip- or both. He took another drink and thought about that for a moment. Just how he was going to breach this that with her was something he couldn’t imagine. Good God, he thought; seeing the hysterics and crying and wondering aloud “how this was to be explained” to all “our” (her) friends.

Milton let a small laugh escape then at the further thought of it. Whatever “this” was he thought, it was serious business to be sure but the gaping look of shock and fright of societal jeopardy that would surely appear on his wife’s face couldn’t help but make the poor man smile.

He read the letter again then and the smile disappeared as the thoughts of a father’s concern came rushing back in.

“Just what the hell is a violation of moral code.” He said to the sea.

Obviously she was in no danger, no personal injury had occurred, no great tragedy had happened. The school would have called. She would have called. Certainly nothing of financial issue had happened either. They absolutely would have called about that. So what could it be? Just what in the good green earth had his beautiful Olivia done to account for expulsion in her final year at a school overflowing with the petulant, conniving, entitled and bored offspring of New York’s wealthiest first rate families?

He thought this with a lifetime’s knowledge of her classmates; of his own classmates in fact. Milton was, always had been, a good man. He had realized both is luck of birth and its responsibilities at a young age and accepted them immediately. He had worked at his fathers, fathers, firm since graduating from his own ivy covered walls of learning and he’d married Gloria Spencer just like he was silently expected to do. But he had been rich his entire life and had witnessed the underbelly of having much and wanting more early and often.

He remembered Richie Barstow laughing at lunch break in the eighth grade after he told the headmaster Mr. Miller had “touched him” and subsequently ruined the poor man’s life forever.

“Bastard wants to fail me!” Richie had said, “Look who’s failed now!”

He remembered Thomas Fulham pointing a manicured finger at Nigel, the only colored student in their school, his senior year and screaming, “Niggers don’t belong here unless they’re serving me lunch or mopping MY floors!” Then he and his friends had pummeled Milton with abandon for choosing Nigel as a lab partner because nobody else would. He remembers his mother weeping in the bedroom while his father explained how a man needed variety.

“..a violation of moral code.” He read the words again, finished his martini and carrying the letter rose up to make another from the corner bar on the porch. The sea had found an inland wind and the welcome smell of its brine calmed him as he thought about his daughter.

He knew it was wrong but he had always loved her the most. The others, they were fine and they looked perfect but were fractured in so many ways. They talked so much and did so little.

Michael had been sixteen and enthralled them all at the dinner table with his perfectly executed report of the Great Depression. Olivia was eleven and began a sidewalk food drive on the corner of their uptown block the next morning.

Constance, bless her heart, had “found “ a dog one day and in pigtails and sundress demanded that they keep it because Debbie Harold had one JUST LIKE IT. The next day she left for school with a brief pat to the dog’s head and Olivia spent the week putting up fliers until the relieved owners called to reclaim him.

Milton sat back down on the porch, sipping his fresh drink, and had all these memories and thoughts bouncing around his head along with the worried theories of just what his Olivia had done. She was no Saint of course. He knew this but her “disturbing” (as his wife called them) qualities had always been so close to his own hidden ones. The acting without thinking at times and seemingly inherent ability to locate trouble when it could be easily avoided, to call a spade a spade when it was so obvious to say nothing at all. To all too often choose fun for fun’s sake regardless of appearances and propriety. These were his gifts first and he had willingly given them up for necessity; seeing those in her, from the very beginning had given him more pride and joy than any of the others could ever bring. He sighed a bit at the thought because until now it had only brought him pride and happiness in seeing himself so clearly in his own child.

But now; what was this? The layers of his mind could only wonder. She was due in on the ferry tomorrow morning, home from school, He would meet her at the landing with flowers, Gloria would be there to unless an event at the club demanded her attention. He wished she would call but thought then that the letter had just arrived. She most likely would think she would beat the mail and explain whatever this was in person. She would explain in her normal measured tone, her loving and caring voice the exact nature of this new turn of fate. She was first rate and she would always make him proud.

He was thinking this as their housekeeper came out onto the porch wrapped in an apron of blue checkers and carrying a fresh pitcher of lemonade.

“ Mr. Milton?” She said. “ Ms. Olivia is on the phone.”

“I’ll take it out here Rose.” Milton said as he folded the letter and put it on the table by his drink.

“Yessir.” Rose said and turned to bring out the telephone.

Staring out at the clear Ocean Milton put his feet up on the small table in front of him, laughing again to himself at the picture of his wife’s rapidly approaching look of dismay and horror.

“Rose…” he called out with a tilted head, “ can you please bring me a fresh martini?”

Very rough draft. A reminder to all intelligent crit is always, always welcome.

At fifteen he decided he was going to be a painter. His mother said he could be anything he wanted to be. His father being dead didn’t have much of an opinion on the matter. He was not a frivolous boy and meticulous by nature. Not exactly the normal primary colors of nature assumed by an artist but he was diligent, patient and in two short years was something of a well known commodity in his small uncultured town.

The mayor commissioned him for a fresco on the south wall of the newly built library and although it was not his favorite form he loved Diego Rivera mightily and with that in mind captured a very nice adaptation of Day of the Dead . This lead to a public showing of all his canvas work that fall coinciding with the annual High School football team’s corn boil; where afterwards over a dozen of the town’s residents proudly displayed his work on the walls inside their homes and offices-he was within their limited confines now fairly famous.

The finished product was never really something he cared for; never had been. It was the process of creation, the discipline, the exact skill of line and colors all coming together for the common goal that was the voice that called to his heart. He felt as he gripped the brush in his hand and slowly stroking the canvas with firm deliberation that he was creating something that would never be created exactly the same again. Not by anyone; even by him.

The summer he turned eighteen he found Jasper Johns while on a trip into the city with his mother. The walked among the colonies of writers, musicians and artists in the village and stopped at a showing of the man’s work going on in an open air gallery.

He wandered among the explosions of color and form wide eyed. He came across a piece called False Start and stood for a full fifteen minutes staring at it without blinking once. Never had he seen something so brilliantly ambiguous and concrete at the same time. He would, he knew then, paint something just as perfect one day.

The mail came one Saturday late that summer. He had been eighteen for almost 3 weeks and they had called his name. His mother cried and fretted and then cried some more and then, twelve weeks later he marched along with the rest of his green laden brothers on the sweltering airport tarmac in Vietnam.
They marched together, all thirty of them, in perfectly synchronized olive steps. Their faces, both black and white, barely able to carry a beard let alone a gun and their eyes were full of both known and unknown fear. All except his. His eyes were soaking up every detail. The sky was a blue he was sure he had never seen and as he marched enjoying the unifying cadence of the group he found the lush landscape before him on the outer reaches of the airfield so beautiful and rich that he formed a mental painting of them instantly.
A week later his company was ambushed in the morning as the crept though a dense jungle while he was noticing the throbbing large veins on the leaves as he brushed them away from his face. As he fought the enemy mortar blasted in the earth around him shooting up spectacular showers of black earth, the bullet fire rushing past him seemed to leave behind light trails of smoke as they passed.
Later, when all was quiet again, he held a boy named Tim, from Muskegon Michigan, in his arms as rivers of ruby blood poured from the boy’s body like the spreading tributaries of an ocean delta. He cried as he stared at Tim’s perfectly severed leg, directly above the knee, and he traced the line of the round bone with his eyes as it protruded from his leg like some ghoulish country ham.
He wrote his mother by flashlight that evening telling her, among other things, that he wanted to be a soldier. Several weeks later, as a white jungle moon danced across the starlit treetops a bullet tore through his brain as he walked point and as his soul floated up to meet the heavens an airplane landed carrying a mother’s letter telling her son he could be anything he wanted to be.

Beth and Lacy started out as friends in the Ninth grade because they had to. Nobody else would have them. Beth was on her fifth city in ten years with her military father and reclusive mother while Lacy had been “re-zoned” into Lincoln high by a matter of ten feet on some city hall map and ripped away from the two friends she had in middle school who were now attending J.F.K. High across the Flathead river. They were both drifting around in unknown skies and during the second week of classes, like two solitary clouds, just came together as one. Lacy was sitting by herself at the lunchroom table, tray untouched with a spoon sticking upright in a mound of red Jell-O; she was writing furiously in pencil some unknown thoughts in a brand new blue spiral notebook. Although the outer cover was turned down out of sight it said at the top in bold black marker:

LACY FORESTER- OPEN UNINVITED AND FOREVER FEEL PAIN.
If found please call 555-5673- Thank you.

Beth had made her way out of the lunch line and with tray in hand surveyed the room. At fourteen years old new schools were old hat to her and she could read a room better than Bill Clinton. She had learned to stay away from the “popular” tables, the crowded judging eyes and fake laughter that only meant ridicule and pain at some point and was about to settle into a small group of girls in secondhand clothes and intelligent eyes when she saw this girl with soft straw colored hair and a long freckled neck totally alone and writing something in a notebook with a intensity that made Marcy smile. So she made her way over and stood on the other side of the table from her.

“Hi,” Beth said.

“Hi,” Lacy mumbled without looking up.

“Mind if I sit down?” Beth asked the top of the straw colored head.

Lacy picked her head up slightly and squinted at this intrusion. She stopped writing but the pencil remained in her white-knuckled grasp.

Her eyes gleamed with brief suspicion and then said quietly, “Go ahead.” At which point she returned to her notebook and continued writing but after Beth had settled into her seat Lacy added, “If ya want my lunch you can have it, I didn’t touch anything except the Jell-O, but it had something crunchy in it.”

Beth busted out laughing so loudly at that Lacy almost jumped out of her skin. She put her pencil down and looked at this crazy raven haired stranger across from her laughing like an idiot and then she started laughing too. From that point on, either in or out of school, you could rarely find one without finding the other. They had, at that moment friends always seem to do, found each other without even knowing it.

They rapidly learned everything friends need to really ever know about each other. Lacy hated this town and longed to get out of school and as far away as possible. Beth had seen too many towns and cities and one was just as stupid as the next as far as she was concerned. Lacy had broken her arm falling from a tree when she was nine. Beth had discovered her older brother’s dead body in the garage while the old dodge truck idled its poison exhaust into the air when she was eleven. Lacy had seen the ocean when she was six and still remembered the sweet salt air and light breeze that blew kisses at night. She thought that was where she might like to live someday. Beth thought that sounded like a wonderful idea. Lacy’s dad drank too much. Beth thought her dad didn’t drink enough. Lacy was a wonderful writer and her stories and poems made Beth cry and laugh; often at the same time. Beth was an exceptional artist and spent hours creating sketches and later, in their junior and senior years, paintings to Lacy’s stories and poems. They were friends in every way and their battles were united, their pain shared and their joy connected throughout the years.

One day towards the end of their freshman year they were sitting in the park by the river, arguing over why Reggie Anderson could or couldn’t possibly be the stupidest boy in school when Lacy said suddenly, “I’m so glad you moved here. I was so scared that all my friends were going to J.F.K. and now I don’t even miss them.”

Beth thought about it and said with sadness painted over with past truths, “Yeah, me to, but don’t get too used to it. My dad always says this is the final move and it never is.”

Lacy nodded understanding and said, “My dad always says he won’t drink anymore and he always does.”

They spent the remainder of the afternoon throwing rocks in the river and calling out every name of every coastal town and city they could remember, debating each in promise for potential future homes.

That first summer passed by mostly in each other’s company, with alternating sleep-overs and in the planning a tree fort that never was built and when their second year began in the fall the bond they shared was strong. It’s strange how two seemingly small, frail and somewhat frightened girls can be such a force when united. They felt older, wiser, maybe even better simply being in each others company. They weren’t outcasts with their peers but they weren’t popular either. They weren’t stoners or jocks or brainiacs or nerds. They were kind of tweeners. They preferred to float around in between all the lines of social demarcation and were neither loathed nor loved by anyone. Lacy hated gym class because she had no boobs and Beth told her she could borrow some of hers until she had her own. They both discovered pot around the middle of that sophomore year thanks to Randy Licklighter and would hang out with the stoners occasionally and get high after school. Sometimes they’d help the booster’s make up banners and posters for homecoming and dances and things due to Beth’s artistic ability but more often than not they preferred to just be with each other. They would talk or Lacy would write and Beth would draw and they would make fun of the world as they knew it.

The summer of their sophomore year only two things really happened. The first was when Beth showed up at Lacy’s door on a day so beautiful the meanest of men would crack a smile. She had a fat joint in her pocket and a little cooler with six beers swimming in ice.

“C’mon, let’s go to the park,” Beth said.

The river flowed by effortlessly and the sun warmed their hair as Beth lit the joint and sucked in deeply, then exhaled with forceful relief and as she popped open a beer and handed it to Lacy said, “My folks are splitting up.”

“What?” Lacy said wide eyed.

“Yeah, about a week ago my dad said we were going to have to move again and…”

What!” Lacy said.

“It takes months sometimes until we know for sure; I didn’t want to say anything until I was- so last night they start fighting about it. My mom said he promised no moves until I could go through high school. My dad started yelling about his career, about some promotion he’ll get for basically doing nothing except going to some god-forsaken place nobody else wants to go to… and then they started fighting about some lady named Carol my dad works with…and this morning they said they were getting divorced.”

“I can’t believe it.” Lacy murmured shaking her head and taking the joint from Beth. “What are you going to do?” She looked at Beth then hard and frightened, “You can’t leave.”

“Mom loves it here. Says she has roots; finally. That she has real friends and that she wasn’t packing up, pulling her daughter out of school and hoping a tiger would change his stripes…or something like that.” Beth opened up her own beer and lay down in the soft grass and watched the clouds overhead drift slowly in and out of each other. “I ‘m staying here with mom; I’m not moving, I wouldn’t want to- even if he wanted me to go with him.”

The rest of the day Lacy leaned up against a tree and wrote a story called Fearless and Beth sat Indian style by the river and sketched a drawing she titled River in Cloudless Skies.

The second thing that happened came slowly and neither one of them really ever saw it until about a week before the fall term. They had blossomed physically: Beth had boobs at an early age but had up to that point been lopsided with them. Like a child with too big a head they didn’t fit the rest of her but her hips had come that summer and her legs had grown long and strong. She was full, balanced; her mother said she looked voluptuous with both pride and worry. Lacy, on the other hand, had grown almost three inches and had now had the lean, athletic build of a swimmer. Her hair was full, lush, and flowed around her face like a blanket. Her mother told her she was beautiful; her father’s gaze, too often drunk with a strange love, made her uncomfortable.

They both floated through the halls into their junior year with a feeling of deliberate dedication to accomplishing… something. They both understood the cusp of decision approaching rapidly. They knew that the clock was turning towards the future and they both felt they were running full stride into its arms. Ready for whatever it had to offer.

Lacy read and read and wrote and wrote. She excelled in her English classes without effort and debated her teacher’s theories sometimes to the point of argument. Beth had graduated to canvass exclusively that summer and brought color and life to her trove of sketches she herself sometimes could not believe. Her grades slipped to barely passing in most subjects except Art and her mother, now alone, was consistently called into conference with worried teachers speaking of potential unrealized. They stuck together though, Lacy and Beth and before a blink of an eye found themselves on the other side of high school politics. They were beautiful but ambivalent. They were smart but unconcerned with clubs or gossip or parties. They had never really “fit” anywhere but suddenly found it difficult to drift between the lines of teenage order and were without warning or cause, alone.

“Let’s just go.” Beth said one Friday after school.

“He’s an asshole. His friends are assholes… what for?” Lacy replied

“It’s just a party.” Beth said. “Christ, my mom doesn’t even come home anymore until Sunday morning, we can stay out all night.” She rolled her eyes with a smile. “Uncle David takes care of her on the weekends.”

So they walked in through the beer can littered yard and into the house and mingled, and drank and laughed and smoked with people that would never remember if they were there or not. They found themselves later in separate rooms upstairs with two boys they had spoken five words to in three years. Making out and playing, and when it started going to places they didn’t want to go picked themselves up and left. They drove home together in the night laughing about the silliness of it all.

That Monday morning they were whores. They had screwed half the boys at the party it seemed and had become in an instant, without ever uncrossing their legs, the easiest girls in school. They didn’t tuck in like turtles after that though. They embraced the thought of it all and wore slippery clothes, winked at the cute boys and stared defiant at their empty-headed girlfriends. They decided that if they were going to have all this sex in the minds of so many they might as well have the fun along with the reputation.

Beth dated Jasper for two weeks, lost her virginity and a week later he asked Stacey Miller to the prom. Lacy “stole” the quarterback, Evan Novak from his student council girlfriend, fucked him twice with little pleasure and then, during the third encounter, before the boy could get his pants off, looked up at him quite seriously and asked him if he could please leave. When the school doors opened to start the summer they were damaged goods. Rumor usually becomes truth at any age but has no fury and permanence like it does at that age and they both reveled in the solitary comfort of being finally, utterly comfortable in their friendship and themselves.

That last high school summer Beth won an award for a painting she had sent in to a “Young Artist” contest sponsored by Coca-Cola- twenty-five hundred dollars and a life-time supply of Coke- which she didn’t even drink. Lacy received her first acceptance from the New Yorker on a story titled “We Only Live Twice,” and placed it on top of a pile of rejection letters bound by a green rubber band. She read the acceptance letter with a pounding heart as she walked into her house and found her father passed out on the couch with a bottle of scotch in his hand.

They wrote and painted that summer and put pins in a map Lacy had placed on her wall. All along the seacoast the pins went: red for absolutely, green for maybe and blue for if we have to. They wrote and painted and thought and talked and knew in some few short months the world would open up before them and were giddy about finally getting swallowed up by it all.

The final year was quick and silly. Beth did what she had to do to pass and Lacy forced her mouth closed to avoid arguments with her teachers and they went through the months. In the final quarter her advanced English class required a poem. So Lacy wrote it. The theme mattered little to her but she pondered and thought and squeezed out the best she could at three in the morning at the small desk in her room. It carried weight and benign deliverance and her teacher accused her of plagiarism. She said she had talent but this was beyond the scope of her age and gave her an F. An easy thing really to challenge that; “look it up somewhere.” is all she would have had to say but it somehow not only didn’t matter, but actually made her feel large and talented and full of promise.

The poem was called “Damaged Girls” and her teacher loved it so and after searching for the rightful author and finding none, framed it and placed it on her classroom wall where it still hangs today. Marcy took the poem to canvass with oil and created a living thing called “Without” which brought her some mild appreciation in the fickle world of art.

Graduation finally came and they took their diplomas to mild applause from their peers and proud smiles of Lacy’s parents and Beth’s mother and new boyfriend Bob. That month after packing their clothes and papers and canvas and brushes into Lacy’s beat up old car they moved to New York. It took some years as it always does but sometimes, thankfully, talent cannot be denied and Beth secured a publisher for a short story collection, Marcy found a sponsor and gallery for her art and they went about the business of doing what they were both, always born to do. They lived in a flat on the lower East side and dated sporadically. The boy’s and sometimes men they saw never managed to do anything more (with the exception of sex) for either of them that they already didn’t do for each other. Beth attempted one relationship that lasted a half year but found it distracted her from her work and the wall street wizard she had initially thought possessed a heart of gold soon discovered it was really more a heart of mildly splintered affection.

They both did well quickly and on a trip they took to Charleston discovered an old broad house streaked with sea sand and salt with a wide ocean facing porch and a widows walk perched on the roof. They remain there together today. So many years later; two damaged girls, writing and painting by the shore.

What a great day. That’s what I was thinking when we pulled up to the drive-through window at Church’s Chicken and pulled the order of leg’s, thigh’s and biscuits away from the pimple faced teenager and into the car. I handed it over to my wife and watched her as she happily picked through the order for accuracy. I drove away and before I could even take the ramp back onto the interstate she had plucked a crispy leg from the bucket and began munching away with her perfect little mouth. James Taylor came onto the radio singing “Sweet Baby James,” and I just couldn’t help thinking again what a glorious, beautiful day.

We had left the hospital an hour before. Everything on the ultrasound was in order. All the fingers and toes were there, and we all started to giggle when the nurse pointed out the tell-tale shadow that let us know a son was on the way. Six more months and we would be parents; I would be a father for the first time and I sat there grinning in silence and staring at my wife’s petroleum covered belly wanting to wrap my arms around her with all the love and pride a man can muster. If the nurse would have allowed it I would have tried to make another one right then and there.

Now we were driving, she was eating the chicken she absolutely had to have and when she said she had to have it I didn’t blink an eye. One of many things I had learned the last four months was not to ever mess with pregnant women’s cravings. Pure foolishness if you even tried to so we stopped at the Church’s that sat three exits from ours and ordered absolutely everything she wanted. With a diet coke. The problem was, even though I wasn’t pregnant, the damn chicken smelled pretty good.

“C’mon baby, gimme a piece.” I asked her.

“You’re driving.” She said simply. “Wait till we get home.”

But I pouted playfully and she handed over a drumstick, which I promptly dropped on the floor under the wheel.

“That’s my man, graceful as a hippo on skates.” I heard her say as I dropped my head and groped around the floor for the greasy leg.

I remember being pushed. That’s what it felt like; it felt like a big hand pushed me in the chest. And then I woke up.

I woke up and that day was five years, four months and twenty-two days ago. So I’m sorry for talking like this happened only yesterday, this wonderful day when the world was bursting with love and hope and a son, but for me it was only yesterday. At least it was two months and thirteen days ago; which is the amount of time that has passed since I came out of the coma I’d been in since the accident. It was strange when I woke up. My arms and legs felt like wet pasta and I knew immediately something was wrong. The first thing I remember thinking was that I tasted chicken. Looking back now it seems silly since I hadn’t even gotten to taste the damn stuff but that’s what I remember. I tasted chicken and I was lying in a scratchy white bed with tubes in my nose and I felt like I wanted to take a shower. I laid there blinking at a florescent light above me and a few minutes later a army of white coated people poured in through the door and a few hours later I found out my wife and son were dead. They’d been dead over five years and I laid in that bed and cried for five hours straight. And then the process of living began.

The physical therapy was intense and seemed continuous. They started me on a liquid diet and then after a few weeks moved me up to solid food which didn’t matter a damn bit because all I could taste was chicken. They brought pudding, ice cream, roast beef and cheeseburgers and it all tasted like chicken to me. The second week Dr. Tomlinson came in for his Thursday visit and said that was something that would pass. The sensation of tasting only chicken I mean. It was a product of the coma and memory and grief; and it would pass.

It didn’t though but I stopped saying anything about it and they eventually, stopped asking; I went through the endless parade of therapy (physical and mental) that would bring me back to the world I now live in. Her parents came last night to the hospital, picked me up and we went to their house for dinner. I am glad they did and appreciate the effort but we barely enjoyed each other before the accident and the conversation was limited almost exclusively to the forks and knives and plates. I was the sad reminder of a wound that would never heal and her mother asked me as I opened the front door to leave why I had not mentioned her name one time. “Why do you avoid them.” Was what she asked and I said I wasn’t sure yet; that I didn’t know. But I did know and I knew to try and explain it to them would be ruthless. I had watched a movie while this world of pain and confusion swirled around me the third or fourth night I had come back and it had mentioned a African tradition of not mentioning the names of the dead. The tradition stated was that once you could say their names aloud again you would then move past the grief of their passing. When I heard it that same feeling of a giant hand pushing me backwards came back and I don’t remember the rest of the movie because I cried for several hours. They wouldn’t understand that. I don’t understand that but I know they have had half a decade to grieve and I have had several weeks. I know I am not ready for names yet; just memories of what should have been and I never mentioned one time that the lovely dinner her mother had prepared; that dinner of Roast Beef, mashed potatoes, gravy and fresh sweet corn that I could smell so clearly all tasted like chicken when I put it into my mouth.

So here I am now waiting on corn bread and soup or pork chops and applesauce; or whatever- knowing all the while what it will taste like. Soon I will leave the hospital as long as the therapy continues to progress and my mind, as they see it, wraps around the reality of things as they are. I look forward to it, to the new beginning of a life without starchy sheets and blood samples and… and emptiness. When it happens I will be glad and I will move on but the fact that I now remain on this rock, with a dead wife and child and that everything will always, always taste like chicken will be with me forever.