Is Laura real or is she an idealization of 18-year-old Paul Nesbitt? When he meets Laura, a middle-class young woman from the city, he attracts her with his rough charm. To deepen her interest, he lies about himself. His lies may cost him Laura, but the truth may cost him more.
Chapter 1
1978, Port Beach on the Raritan Bay, New Jersey
Marking five o’clock, the Perfume Factory’s sirens wailed for another thirty seconds, just to make sure the employees didn’t miss quitting time on Friday night. Before the sirens quieted, the workers streamed out the gates like marathoners when the starter’s pistol fires, heading for their Fords and Toyotas, and then the bars that marked every quarter mile of highway from Five Corners to Atlantic Highlands. Well, you could leave the Perfume Factory, the locals’ name for Universal Fine Fragrances, or UFF, but it wouldn’t leave you.
Even on weekends, the plant spilled out the sickly-sweet odors that made Port Beach smell like the bottom of a trashed purse. During the week when the plant was in full swing, the vapors came rolling into the Front by mid-morning and stay until the evening offshore breeze. Downwind, you’d know a Perfume Factory guy from a block away. Though my old man hadn’t worked there in a year, his clothes still reeked of its chemicals.
When the sirens stopped, it was quiet on the marsh except for the squawk of seagulls alighting on the refuse piles of Panpy’s Dump to the west. A couple of hundred birds circled the mounds, which advanced like a glacier. Once a week, Panpy bulldozed dirt over the fresh heaps, but it didn’t stop the smell, especially in summer. If it were a choice between the garbage and the chemicals, I’d take the garbage. But today I was shielded from both smells, for my lungs were filled, my skin was stained, and my clothes were wet with strawberries.
Since early morning, my friend Hector and I had been picking out at Flynn’s Farm, and I was stiff from crawling the rows searching for ripe berries among all the green and yellow ones. By late July, there’d be so much fat red fruit that you could sit at one spot along the row and fill half a tray. But in mid-June, you’d be lucky to get a quart basket every ten yards. I’d worked in the fields three summers, each year hoping for a better job. But except for the Perfume Factory, where you had to be eighteen to apply, there were no jobs in Port Beach. I’d be eighteen in two months, so I picked. But it was money, and I wasn’t complaining. It would be awhile before I gained enough to become unconscious of it, as Arthur advised. No worries there.
I followed the path along Hattey’s Creek, one of five that flowed from Raritan Bay into Port Beach. The Five Fingers, we called them, and Hattey’s, the southernmost, was the thumb, twice as wide and deep as the others. During storms, Hattey’s overflowed its banks last, turning the marsh into a lake in twenty minutes. The creeks, once shy, now surged over the dead-end roads in the swampland, reclaiming their dominion. Cars, boats, and uprooted docks floated above the streets, candy wrappers in the gutter.
Midway across the marsh, where the creek was widest and deepest and boats used to moor, before a hurricane tore loose the landings, my brother Tommy balanced on a tall piling and lifted his arms above his head. He wore only underwear, which, wet and heavy, sagged from his ass. Like me, he was skinny, but hard too, with the muscles playing as he straightened and drew a deep breath. He stood as straight and white as a piece of chalk.
No one had taught him to dive, but he was the best in town, better than me, and I’d had a lesson or two at the public pool in Keansburg. He locked his hands right, jumped high and dove perpendicular, not making a splash. He wasn’t afraid to dive from any height. Without challenge, he’d plunge off any trestle or pier, jumping headfirst from thirty or forty feet. He never checked the water for danger lurking. I told him about the current moving stuff, how a piece of waterlogged barge with a spike sticking out might be waiting unseen, but he just grinned.
He pushed off the post. He hung in the air for an instant, his body bent at the waist, his hands touching his toes, his blond hair a crown, and then he straightened and plunged, his legs so placed against each other they could have been one limb.
As he struck the creek, I thought that if he hit something, the water would muffle the sound—and his scream. I was considering it the way you’d think about a problem in school, when I imagined Tommy with a spike sticking in his head. My stomach tightened as the creek flowed unbroken over where he should be surfacing. Walking to the bank’s edge, I looked into the pale green, thinking he should have been visible. I saw only my reflection, the narrow, sun-burnt face with thick eyebrows, jelled hair combed back straight and pushed up in a pomp, old style.
Tommy broke the surface, sucked air, and laughed, as if he’d been faking what I had imagined. He disappeared again to come up along the muddy bank, grabbing the reeds. Above him, two kids Tommy’s age sat on clumps of swamp grass, smoking. As he climbed up beside them, water streaming out of his underwear, he turned his head and saw me. He spit and said, “Hey, Paul, where did you come from?”
His buddies dropped their cigarettes fast in case I was an adult, their faces going blank, as kids do when they’re caught and want to look innocent. Realizing I was nobody to worry them, they picked up their butts, nodding to me like we’d pulled off something together.
“You’re an Indian, aren’t you? Tell them,” said Tommy. “My brother’s like an Indian. Never hear him coming. Just like an Indian, huh?”
“Ain’t no Indian,” said one of the boys.
“He’ll fucking scalp ya, he will.” Tommy clapped his hand over his mouth. “Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo!” Tommy hopped around his friends, who smacked at his legs and feinted putting their cigarettes out on his feet.
“You better come home,” I said.
“Ain’t six.”
“They put the clocks forward an hour today.”
“No shit?” he said, stripping out of his underpants, his buddies staring at him. Tommy had only one ball, the left, the right one failing to descend. My mother hadn’t got it fixed when he was younger, so now she said that nothing could be done, which meant we couldn’t afford a doctor to do it. Even with his friends gawking, Tommy didn’t act embarrassed. He didn’t give a shit. He twisted his underwear and squeezed until the water stopped coming out. Holding the underwear in his teeth, he gathered up his jeans, which lay folded on the marsh grass, and slipped into them.
“See you guys later,” he said, starting off ahead of me, not bothering to pick his way through the shards of glass and broken wood that littered the path, but tramping on it with his bare feet as if he didn’t notice it, and maybe he didn’t.
A hundred yards along the muddy trail, the roof of our house rose over the rushes, the wide green shingles sparkling under the sinking sun. It was the third place we’d lived in since my father lost his job at the plant. The marshals evicted us from the first one, standing steadfast on our porch while my mother cried for their pity and swore at their heartlessness. We went quietly from the second, whose owner was Lou Ferraro, a big Guinea with hands the size of horseshoe crabs. We were still making payments to him on the back rent. The new house wasn’t any castle, but it had three bedrooms. My sister, Meg, had her own. Tommy and I shared a bedroom, which we’d always done. He was a great sleeper. He never moved, never made a noise, as if he were dead. That was another funny thing about him. Sometimes he’d go to sleep in the middle of stuff he was doing. He’d be kicking a ball around and just fold up on the ground as in a trance. Usually not too long, but he’d be dead to the world. And when he woke up, he acted like nothing had happened.
Tommy walked several paces in front of me, tossing his balled-up underwear into the air and catching it. From the western side of the meadow came sharp reports, followed by an explosion. Fourth of July was weeks away, but the kids set shit off summer long. The last blast had been an ashcan, powerful as a quarter stick of dynamite. Big enough to blow off your fingers.
“You pick strawberries today?” asked Tommy.
“Yeah.”
“You like picking?”
“I like money.”
“Loan me two bucks?”
“Forget it.”
“I need some fireworks.”
“What happened to the stuff I gave you?”
He looked in the explosion's direction. “I want to buy a couple of ashcans.”
“Forget it.”
“What’s the matter with that? I ain’t no baby.”
“You don’t use your head.”
“Alright. I’ll buy them, anyway.”
We emerged from the marsh into our backyard. Tommy went straight into the house, but I walked over to the Camaro I had bought back in March from a woman whose husband had died pulling the motor. Hector and I had pushed it for two miles to my backyard, where it now sat under a canvas tarp. Except for dings in the right front fender and no engine, the car was cherry. Dropping in a block cost a thousand more, but at three hundred, the Chevy was a steal, which was how I got it.
On a moonless Saturday night in February, two hours after the bars had closed, Hector and I had broken into Cavaretti’s Tavern and cleaned out the cash register, pool table, cigarette machine, and juke box. We’d grabbed four hundred dollars. All Hector kept was fifty, letting me have the rest to buy the Chevy. I’d stolen plenty of stuff before that, but nothing near the money we took out of the bar. Everything went smoothly, until we had to bust up the juke box to get in its coin box. The next day every cop in town was listening to Cavaretti scream how he was gonna cut the fucking hands off the fucking goombahs who fucking did it. The police took the robbery seriously, dusting for fingerprints. It even made the county paper. The cops had picked me up a dozen times as a suspect in petty thefts, but though they got the right guy a couple of times, they never charged me. Never took my prints. I knew when to keep silent. If they brought me in for Cavaretti’s, it might be different. They hadn’t pulled me in, though when Sergeant Stanch cruised by the Front, he looked me over good. Still, I couldn’t think of any mistakes we’d made during the break-in, like leaving a wallet or taking something the cops could trace.
A couple of days after the robbery, we’d hitched twenty miles south to Asbury Park where we traded the change for bills at a half dozen different arcades. I wasn’t buying the car with pocketsful of quarters, but the woman who sold us the Camaro was still surprised I’d come up with the money. Even when you do everything right, you’ve got to be lucky. To buy an engine, I would have to pick strawberries all summer. One hundred and forty thousand, I’d calculated, but I wasn’t risking the reformatory with another theft this soon.
I pulled off the tarp, opened the door, and slid behind the wheel. The canvas and metal had sealed in the day’s heat, cooking the leather, drawing out that rich smell sweeter than any flower’s fragrance. I settled into the seat, closed my eyes and grabbed the chrome knob of the floor shift. I clutched and went through the gears, forward, then backward. Forward, then backward. I cruised along Highway 36, swooping from the Highlands toward Sandy Hook, which wrapped its arm around the bay, fending off the Atlantic, hurling itself against the south shore. The ocean spray became snow swept mountains or endless fields of grapevines. Colorado or California, a place west where I’d never been. I saw on the map how Route 66 ran straight through them. I’d yet to make it to that highway, but the summer before, Hector and I took a bus to Florida, thinking we could get jobs and “make our fortune.” Nobody needed our services. In fact, the only attention we attracted was police cruisers. Picked up, questioned and generally hassled, we got escorted out of a half-dozen towns by well-fed cops who would drop us off at the city limits and point north.
Standing with my thumb out in South Carolina, I realized that unless you go there in a car, you’re not there. You can only be somewhere if you can leave fast. In America, if you want to move on, best you have a car.
I threw the Chevy into neutral, opened my eyes and glanced at our kitchen window, where behind the screen my father sat drinking a glass of beer and reading, classical music from the table radio drifting out with his cigarette smoke. You’d think he was so deep into his book, he would just keep turning pages when I walked in, but likely he was waiting for me, ready with a ration of shit. I weighed heading straight to the Front, but I needed something in my belly.