Halfway
On the Atlantic there is a town where the bars close at 2 a.m.. Last call is about 1:25 and two railroad tracks run adjacent to one another, flat and straight and parallel to the coast just about over a mile west from it. They do through grasses bristled slender and wispy, like broomsedge, and their horns blare through them and wash over around and through the fans of dwarf and saw palmettos, and, like magenta maracas, oscillate berry clusters on American bushes that line this Floridian corridor. The town can be heard even in New York City when New York City quiets and its wind gusts up to thirty-seven miles an hour — waves crashing for every gale lancing narrow one-ways flanked by railroad apartment blocks, an even-tempered ocean evinced by zephyrs. Feels like 12°.
For a seaside village modest in population, there is a significant drug-addicted community. They hail from Pittsfield, Pittsburgh, Paterson, Dover, Dover, Dayton, Dayton, Buffalo, Bristol, Cincinnati, Albany, Utica, Toledo, Stamford — and these towns still exist and can be found on maps. There is the option, even, to drive to and through them from this village by the sea, thanks to Ike et al. Though ease is not guaranteed, as three hundred and fifty miles of Florida is.
The bars were closed by now and Jesse was pulling an oxblood 2005 Ford Taurus with a quarter tank left and quarter of its rear bumper missing on the driver’s side into the parking lot of a floodlit BP gas station. It wasn’t quite 2 a.m., and having scored no invitation to close it down or head to an afters, he opted to drive around. Stopped now for a few tall boys before the teetotaling law would deny him, he found himself outside and in line to approach the clerk’s window. He was drunk in a good way, a warm way, and the weather was perfect. It usually is around Christmas. Breezy but never cold, and swaying the fronds of tall palmettos in clear night, and producing pleasing sibilant sounds with needles and branches of the odd pines on the perimeter of the asphalt plot. There was some bass and bumper rattling from the other side of the station. There was the moon, too, effulgent in the clear night sky. So clear as if to ask, look. can you see them all? though you wouldn’t, as the fluorescent won out. Man’s place in nature. And then her.
“Hey handsome! Your tall!”
Jesse turned oafishly with the two Steel Reserves he spent his last dollars on, holding them together, as one, as a priest does a monstrance, and saw before him a white girl in her mid twenties or thirties with thick wavy black hair that got most of its body now from the salt in the sea. Split ends fell buoyantly at the waist of bedazzled True Religion jeans and over a small man’s flannel, ferruginous in its palette, which on her was big. Her figure was callipygian and about five feet and a few inches in Champion slides and white ankle socks and her skull housed doelike russet eyes, clear in the white and wide-pupiled, and her face was scabby. The girl smirked.
The boy threw his head back shyly and with goatee and a goofy grin chuckled, “hey… ‘sup?”
Her eyes and brows dancing salsa — 1,2 and together. 3,4 back to center. One more time.
“I like your tee!” She stepped closer. “What are you doing?”
Her girlish animation concealed any licentiousness. Jesse was drawn in. He would not have denied her if she was candid, though.
“Welllll… Shit.” He stretched his neck from left to right as if to see an idea but it appeared more like he was showing off the cubic zirconia in both lobes or checking to see if he was being surveilled. Cameras were rolling on the pumps.
“I’m just kinda dri —”
“Do you got a cigarette? Could you get me a pack?”
He explained to her his current cashlessness.
“Hey you know what?” on second thought, “Let me drop these in my car and check right quick.”
He leaned in from the driver’s side, rummaging for loose change in the cup holders. Mostly Lincoln and Jefferson. Legal tender. The car was on and the radio rapped faintly.
“I’m straight with three oh FIIVEs!” she called like a question, cheerfully, over to him from some yards behind; her eagerness like a parent waiting to see their kid emerge unscathed from the grounds of a school leaving lockdown after an active shooter event. In under a minute Jesse produced the four and change needed to cover the low-budget smokes.
He didn’t mind the scabs. She was good looking besides them. I been high before too. so what. He approached her from the car.
“And heeeeeere…” red-eyed Jesse outstretched both hands, like a dumping track-hoe, to gift to the girl many coins that did not add up to very much, “you go!”
But it was enough and she received them all in her own hands like the eucharist, nails with dirt and speckled by an old coat of black nail polish. A head did roll on the transfer, and Jesse promised her upon receiving an apology not to worry about it and that he would get it for her in a moment. Smiling, she said thank you, and he knelt to fish the coin from an oil slick and drop it in with the Scrooge Mcduckesque pile amassed in her hands, and she smiled and turned to patronize the Haitian gas man.
There was Dana, then, halfway-home passenger princess, eschewing settling in and seatbelt to fidget and engage with Jesse in ways he thought were cute and aroused him while he drove them out of the oil toward the water. She faced him and complimented him and he was wooed by the sultry rasp in her voice and she touched his neck and he grabbed her with one hand when he wanted and they were both alit and cruising at thirty-five.
Heading east the strangers toured the town.
They slowed to roll through the dining district that was dead by now, though the lights were still on about the businesses and bistros. Along the boulevard to the north of them they passed a few straggling homebound pedestrians, sated on filets of mignon and mahi mahi and carafes of cab sauv and buckets of Mich Ultra, readying, with arms and breasts on one another, to test the DUI-Gods. To the right side of the ride, a man that was really more of a boy in an oversized white button down and black waist apron expeditiously wiped flipped and stacked round aluminum bistro tables. He was ungainly in his movements outside of his closing duties, as his forehead wiping and shoe tying would betray. Charting a course for the beachfront promenade, Jesse and Dana’s procession was escorted by foxtail palms both north and south whose smooth taupe trunks were wrapped in white led Christmas lights and whose bases were lit up by uplights. They watched a man in a backwards visor and cream linen shorts and a golfer’s polo vomit a great gush of bubbles and froth all over a spot of downtown village-by-the-sea restaurant-district brick while leaning with one palm against a luminous palm. Dana laughed loudly and without revealing it Jesse felt it was a gratuitous laugh.
“Fucking funny… so tell me what’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen in this town?” She pulled on her third cigarette of the ride and made for one of the beers in the cup holder. “You’re from here right? I’m pretty new but I basically know all the spots to go downtown like… like right here you see this little road?” She leaned in front of him out of her seat, pointing with all of her right arm and smoke through the driver’s window. She smelled of sweat and the sea, and even in the dark of the cabin her tan was evident as was the tone of he arm.
“The lil’ alley? Yeah I know the spot.”
“Yeah there that bar behind it,” she dragged and sat back against the passenger door, rolling out a leg from under her to place a foot in his lap, and self aware in smugness told him while she twisted her mouth “my friend is a bouncer there.”
Jesse looked at her with a raised right brow and his lips apart as the car drove forward. He laughed softly and shook his head.
“That’s cool,” he flicked his cigarette out with his left and paying mind to the road in front of them squeezed her foot.
It was plain as day to Jesse that Dana was more fresh faced than she let on. He knew the type well, they were legion. And she was of them, enrolled in a drug rehab university circuit that banked on recidivism where they took her parents money and took it again at the same rate if she fucked up. and she did.. and they kicked her out then had to go find her at some hutment and put her back in a building block that they wouldn’t call a hutment where they confiscated most of her personal belongings and ignored complaints about a creepy house manager. A diet of Kratom and Kava during détente.
Michigan, maybe. Or Pennsylvania.
The whir of tires on the open downtown road gave way to a buzz as they met steel grid grating of the road deck of a double leafed bascule bridge carrying them over the intracoastal and closer to the shore. Dana pulled her flannel off and left it without care on the floor of the passenger’s seat. In her white tank top, her chest was perky, and Jesse noticed more blemishes there and on her neck. Reaching forward she grabbed his right hand on the automatic gear shift with both of hers to massage it.
“Oh my god you’re so soft.”
“You are too.” Her hands were small and shapely and rough.
“So tell me.”
“Well I don’t know… I can’t really think of anything on the spot right now I’m not good like that.”
“O come onnnnn,” she pleaded childishly, digging her toes into his gut.
“Hey! Haha chill…” There was a pause and she stared at him with a lewd look and the car purred. “Well you know what?”
“What!”
“Well shit there was — and we didn’t see it happen but we were close by the EMTs and firetrucks on the tracks after the fact.”
“What? A trainwreck?”
“Well no, not exactly.”
They met the end of the boulevard, as east as they could go without drowning or becoming hammerhead fodder. Jesse noticed a deputy parked across the beach road and to the south, lights out. Faggot. He popped the left blinker on and looking both ways turned north.
“There were these kids that used to have this little fort. They were these little white trash kids. They had a fort on the railroad tracks.”
“On it?”
“No, like to the side of it. Not on it.”
They picked up speed on A1A, returning to the thirty-five they left the gas station in. The seagrape that lined the shore susurrated and Dana’s hair was energetic.
Jesse continued, “Anyway they used to put stuff on the railroad tracks for fun and sit back and watch the train come through. It was kinda funny. Kinda sick — we’d actually caught em and seen em once do it with a whole stack of these wood pallets haha. Crazy little fucks.
“At some point they get the idea to steal shopping carts from the Walmart and roll them over onto the tracks. And one day, in broad daylight, they’re doing their bullshit, lining up two or three of these things in a row to get obliterated, and this old lady from the neighborhood is walking to cross. She’s waiting for the train she’s on her way to fuckin Walmart — just walking to Walmart as one does in this town and the train hits the shopping carts and some of the shrapnel metal flies at her and rips through her head and heart like a fuckin .50 cal.”
“No fucking way…”
“YEAH. And like I told you we pulled up to the crossing just a few minutes after and the shit was… grisly.”
“That’s CRAZY!” Dana guffawed then covered her mouth then smacked his shoulder. He flinched and gave her a playfully incredulous look. “Nothing like that ever happened where I’m from,” she said.
“Yeah they all went to fucking juvee and I think one of them murdered his girl’s chihuahua later.”
“Wait, handsome. Can you turn left here and go by the quick stop?”
Confused and apprehensive, Jesse replied, “ok yeah but… I don’t have any money you know that.”
“I just wanna pick up something by the quick stop… my friend lives next to it.” She paused, there was silence between them for a moment, Jesse hesitant, Dana hoping. “You’re down right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh come on…” she pulled herself up to his side with a hand on his chest and began to breathe in his ear. “Come on baby.”
Dana began to kiss his neck and take hold where her foot was earlier for the ride. Jesse breathed heavily.
“I’ll suck it good. Really good. And I’ll be quick,” she whispered in his ear.
“Do it now then,” and Jesse rolled the Taurus into the parking lot of an Episcopalian church just a few blocks out.
Ten minutes past, then thirty, and Jesse became angry at himself. Why the fuck am I still waiting here. What the fuck am I doing. The malt liquor buzz was failing to hold the work of the past night intact and just when he was about to head out of the lot he saw her leave the apartment on the top floor of a low-rise walk-up and shuffle in her slides down concrete steps toward the car.
“Sorry sorry sorry,” she closed the car door and was rustling with something and Jesse began to pull out of the motel lot. The windows were up by now, they had been since he dropped her off.
“It’s alright, I’m just out of beer.”
“Well I got something way fucking better than beer dude.”
“Ok duuuuude.”
Dana had not looked at him once after returning from her score, even in the car now, she was fixated on the sheeny orb in her hands.
Jesse drove aimlessly for a bit before she perked up and looked at him zanily.
“You know what we should do… take me to the spot where it happened.”
“There’s not much to see,” he was growing impatient with her. It all felt like a chore now to him since he had come and again he was out of beer and she was moving through the cigarettes too quickly now. Her face was scabby.
“But it’s close by. I wanna see.”
He relented. “Sure sure.”
He hung a right at the next light and after a five minute ride parked in an overgrown lot that was empty save for two boat trailers and idled. The Walmart across the tracks was still open for anyone who dared, its own parking lot vast deserted and bright. 103.5 The Beat played a Drake song that Dana was in the mood to enjoy with the rest of her company, and she raised the volume a bit.
“Oh this is perrrrrfect,” bouncing her knees mouthing lyrics and nodding her head to the beat, she finished unfurling the rock in her spheroid and produced a pipe.
“There’s not much to see. I told you.”
A lighter flickered to lick its flame at some otherworldly bulb. Dana was in darkness and only in faint orange flares was she visible to Jesse now — her being backlit by the superstore lights making her hard to make out. After a few unsuccessful attempts and a change in tools courtesy of Jesse — there was inferno; Cytherean conflagration in her dirty delicate hands to move viscous and acrid smoke through the conduit, and into her lungs, and into the cockpit.
Jesse watched her and moved to take the pipe from her but in an instant she gripped tightly in a grotesque contortion of her fists and threw her head back violently, and then forward, knocking into the radio tuner and landing them on Beethoven’s Seventh.
“Hey… Hey let me… are you good?” Jesse leaned toward her, trying to make eye contact by getting close to her face. But writhing and then like an amoeba, Dana began to pour out of the car, all at once effortlessly and inchmeal.
“HEY!” Jesse stayed seated in his car, leaning over the passenger seat to shout for her, his hand still on the wheel. Timpani roll and brass began to blare loudly and he could see she was no longer sauntering but now instead like a whirling dervish she was pirouetting and wheeling off into the night along the unlit railroad tracks. As the dancer got smaller and smaller, Jesse, in disbelief that the cigarettes were gone too, began to pull out of the lot. He turned into a redlight at the train crossing.
Well.. maybe my mother’s. Grab some cash. Or I could just head west. No west is not an option. If you want to start anew, rolling a Taurus into Reno or Vegas… you might as well call it quits then and there. There are no prospects in the desert. 95 then, North. Nonstop till St. Augustine and in the morning when you’re on the road again you can stop in Fernandina Beach for some touristy Florida shirts. On through Georgia, and.. Utah? Michigan? Pennsylvania?
At the red the lights began to flash and the crossing bells began to peal and the gate began to lower.