Short story 2

Karma and Monsters

Jack was a small boy, always short for his age, with big dopey ears and straw brown hair that wouldn’t comb straight. He moved like a Muppet, bobbing up and down, big silly mouth open as he walked, and if you saw him at a distance you’d have expected his eyes to be blue, not the harsh grey green of the harbors he haunted. Despite his short stature, or perhaps because of it, he was Bart Simpson at the lunch table, the Zack Morris of the halls. 

Natalie was by contrast tall, but with a pudgy face and a mop of tangled straight blond hair. She was 90 percent legs, but boyishly managed to embody discomfort when she was forced into a dress, hands oft times dirty being that there were far too many hours on Saturday between lunch and dinner.

She believed her Nana Bassett must have been as wise as everyone said, cause’ if you laughed too much before you went to sleep, you did end up crying. The children held this belief in common. Likewise, big smudges of brown freckles cascaded across each face come summer as Jack’s mom would take them to the beach almost every day. She would use the tips she had made the night before at the bar to pay the toll at Hardings Beach or Cockle Cove. She sometimes brought friends, and they would drink and sleep on the beach while the children diligently tried not to get sand in the popcorn or saltwater in their eyes.
 Jack’s mom was Natalie’s sister, and Jack was her nephew. They would feel special when they told people this, not awkward or strange, for it had never occurred to them that they ought to. To Natalie, having people mistake her big sister for her mother was something altogether silly, but their mom had her first at 16, Natalie’s sister was now barely 19. So for people seeing two small children looking so much alike and playing together, siblings was the natural conclusion. 

They all lived in a small village right on the coast that had a big hotel where rich people went to play golf and get grass stains on their boat shoes. These people wore bibs when they ate lobster, mispronounced the word scallops, were baffled by rotaries, and like all seasonal tourists believed buying a tee-shirt and really wearing it out, would some how make you a local. 

It was slow and grey in the winter there, but in those August days, when red tide didn’t make it that far into the bay, there was money to be made—bushels of it. There was work in any field you wanted, as long as you knew how to hold the tool and didn’t expect your summer tan to go all the way up the back of your arms. Jack’s mom and Natalie had brothers who crewed ships bound for George’s Bank and back, hunting cod, scrod or sand shark on the long lines or by their gills. They scraped the beds down Monomoy for cherrystones and topnecks, and the straights down Jackknife for quahogs and mussels. They were young for men but big for boys.

Nat and Jacky, as the grown folk called them, caught the tail end of a long  swimming lessons tradition  down Oyster Pond.  With their cut feet and stinging eyes they would crowd up on the beach just after  to eat Italian Ice or Screwballs when the ice cream truck came to park on the piles and piles of cigarettes butts and imported sand.  The two children would entertain themselves with digging for China—the other side of the world, an escape—but they always hit the water table first.

They had a big family and that was fine mostly; between the fights, at least. A lot of bad things happen before Jacky and Nat were ever born. There was a lot of raw feelings and horrible holidays no one liked to talk about unless they were shoving and drunk. Told back to the pair it sounded like an ugly Lifetime drama where wads of money get stored inside books and children are better ignored then elected hostage. Jack’s mom in particular had a lot of problems because someone who she should have been able to trust hurt her very badly when she was still a little girl. Jack and Natalie had never met the monster, but they talked time to time about killing him, even when they were very young, because they had always known. The whole town had always known. Quietly, this is what hurt them all most.

When Jack’s mom went to the hospital for hurting herself, the whole family visited her. They took turns going in. Jack and Natalie went in together. The story of how the police officer had pulled her over for speeding after washing down 32 sleeping pills with a too many glasses of wine was hard for the children to swallow. She still had a ring of charcoal around her lips from the stomach pumping when she tried to explain why she was there to her little Jacky. It wasn't Oreo cookie, and she wasn’t allowed to keep the flowers they had brought her, so they left them in the big parking lot where they could be squatted next to while everyone cried.

Years later, Jack would go in and out of that same hospital for problems of his own, and when he took his own life, Natalie would think of the monster that hurt her sisters, her mother and her brothers. She would play one song over and over again breathing in and out all of the ugly, most of the sad, half of the sorted truths brought  on by anger and the drinking, and even as she hated herself for crying over it, she would remember the monster she never been aloud to meet, or to kill and she would clench her jaw and both her fists over how it could have all been different.

♫"Hello hawk, come pick me up.."♫

The call came on weekend. She had slept in. Natalie thought Jack was in jail or something, hardly reason enough to wake her at nine—jail at least would have been a half life. Instead, she heard the truth from the floor, on her knees, where she landed, when she fell with her mouth open screaming, “He’s not dead, he’s not dead. You have to be wrong. He’s not dead.”

Everything came together and back to her in pieces. He was dead.  But he had be so alive! Perhaps an unfair amount of alive had once lived in Jacky. His smile had been an infection to spread through a room.

At Christmas you could always make up with him eventually, thanksgiving too. No one stays mad forever. They say he had the biggest showing at Nickerson Funeral home in 4 generations.  But Natalie remembered him humming his own theme music whenever they would do something dangerous. She doubted anyone else had ever even noticed. They say that guys who jumped out of planes along side him came round for a spell, but Natalie had roof tops to remember, and tree tops too. They say there were people and pictures everywhere that night. Supposedly, the line was out the door and around the block. But  Natalie wouldn't be caught dead at a wake. She held on instead to zip-lines, bikes in the rain and a thousand fun summers with pirates and Indians.

“I’m tired of being kicked in the balls.” He had texted to his mother right where he smoked his last cigarette, and only moments before he put his hunting rifle into his mouth and kissed the world goodbye. The police found him around three that morning, less than a mile from their old house, his truck parked a little ways off the street. The moon was full, and it had been such a lovely night for driving, reflecting, and apparently, fighting with his wife. Jack had wanted his own family harder then anybody else, and maybe he was getting better at staying mad on Christmas.

He was cremated in his Red Sox hat, so that when the family pressed their hands to his icebox cheek, all painted and false, they could pretend not to notice the exit wound. But his neck had been at an odd angle, and he couldn’t fake sleep without smiling. Not Jacky, not to save his life. He had been such a brave boy, once.

She thought again about killing Him, the monster that had robbed them all of everything that mattered in a small town. He was an old man by now, he had to be. Natalie’s older brother, the good one, told her that the monster had called him and had said that the monster would soon die. Natalie’s brother felt riotous in telling him about Jack and about how the monster had ruined everyone’s lives. Natalie’s brother told the monster he was happy he would die.

He said, “I guess Karma’s a mutha fucka” You could hear him smile through the phone when he told it back to you.

And when the monster died, Jack was still dead.

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