AND THE SUN SOARED FROM THE SEA, OH ME
by Bob Arter

The tin clock screamed and my feet hit the floor before I could disentangle my limbs from Jenny's and Jenny was merely a dream. One moment later I released her, hand slipping from her breast, sudden tears flooding my eyes as I beat the clock to death. That's just the way I woke up in those days.

Four o'clock. Ay em. I stood, naked, and climbed into my jeans (underwear later, after the shower, there would always be a shower) and pawed through the heap of fresh laundry I'd dumped onto the floor from my duffel bag, big old leaky green burrito, after checking in around midnight. Found an olive-drab T-shirt and put that on, and stumbled into the apartment's darling plastic kitchenette to make some coffee.

New apartment, new town, old percolator-style coffeepot, the kind I'd blackened on so many frigid mornings in the Mojave Desert, camping, cursing the cold, boiling water over a greasewood fire, burning my lips on the aluminum canteen cup.

This was Bradley Beach, New Jersey, I recalled, hearing the pot's gurgle and slop, another Army post but the same goddamned war. They'd sent me up to Fort Monmouth for advanced training and in the United States Army, advanced training means a chance to sit down. They would teach me about radio antennas and concertina wire and the cannons of Fort Ticonderoga and how to tie a Western Union pigtail knot and do effective leadership without getting fragged by your boys. I didn't care what they'd teach me; it was all a jerk-off, but it would put off my tour for another four months.

I'd arrived a few hours earlier, after driving that goddamned I-95 up from Georgia all day, all week, all my life. I was twelve feet tall and still felt creaky from a Volkswagen day, still smelled the scum I'd absorbed on the Washington Beltway.

I opened the door to get a sense of Jersey and Jersey in November was cold as a bitch so I shut the door in a hurry and drank some coffee. Found my field jacket, put it on to warm it up. Turner, it said above the left pocket. That was me, all right.

Turner.

Went and found my outsized coffee mug. On the mug was a Vargas girl, a bouquet of balloons, some hippie rhetoric, a few discouraging words from Jean Genet, a cartoon gallery of Bronte women, some silly girl's infatuation with pandas and koalas and the unconscious imagery of snakes, carnival booth snapshots of Jenny–Jenny–Jenny. On the mug was the Song of Solomon and the Book of Revelations. On the mug was the evening news, a man wearing a quiet suit and a reassuring smile, reciting the day's bodycount—and dissolve to film, the bright blossom of napalm on some meaningless hilltop, the screams at that distance merely squeaks, small crazed creatures trying to escape a forest fire.

I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them again, my noncommittal blue speckled mug had reappeared.

The coffee was good and I congratulated myself on cooking it. Officer, gentleman, dark-of-night chef. Finally lit up the day's first smoke and oh dear God it was good, so much better for the wait.

On the counter was a bag containing two stale donuts. I'd bought them and a couple of others yesterday in Carolina. A girl at the counter scooped them up in pieces of wax paper and dropped them into the bag, telling her colleague, Walter said he wanted me to work late last night, inventory. I told him to kiss my butt. In the south, butt will cost you about six syllables. Her friend nodded in total understanding.

I stuffed the paper bag in one of my field jacket's big pockets, smokes and matches in the other.

I didn't want shoes that morning. I wanted the feel of Jersey, naked as Jersey could make herself, pressing into my soles.

#

Bradley Beach was created directly from asteroid sauce, stippled and cratered and down the stairs to the rest of it, which was either blacktop or whatever they make sidewalks out of. It was urban shit, and I instantly hated it.

But there's only one sea on this planet, and she is home to us all. It called and it offered its salt scent and I followed readily enough. I had never seen the piece called the Atlantic Ocean, and I had never seen the sun rise from the sea. This day I would.

A minute later I stepped onto the boardwalk, splintered planks disappearing into that long strange past you sense only in the colonies, and I immediately knew where they led: past taffy emporia and gaudy arcades, through vintage blue-law villages and liberty town strip joints, kids selling baggies of oregano, Ring the Bell and Win Your Girl a Kangaroo. Right on by the citizens disdain for soldiers, which was understandable enough—you could respect a mercenary, a Hessian, a gun for hire; hell, you had to contract them out. I had merely been privatized.

I warmed my hands on my coffee mug and shivered a bit. And prowled around on all that wood, still ignoring the ocean's slow, rattling draw maybe fifty meters away, searching for a star in the pre-dawn mist. Most of the shops were boarded up; the season was over and the Mafia fat men had taken their wives and kiddies back to Connecticut and New York's pinball business, the drugs and the girls and the rackets, all were safe for another year.

The sky was brightening now, but there was no hurry. I saw a park bench bolted to the boardwalk, a genteel perch from which to relax with your woman in her pinafores and petticoats and whale-bone stays and view the sand and all the water from there to Europe. Lacking any such creature, I stood on the bench with my back to the sea and peered into the west, searching for California.

I saw fruited mountains thrust into amber sky's majesty, the standard carpet of purple grain, long shag. I saw hate and howls and yawning indifference, one nation invisible, but for the life of me I couldn't locate the Pacific.

North America was in the way.

#

I had never been to Paris, Florence, Caracas, Melbourne, the Yukon—never been anywhere, unless you count Mexico, where the peso was still eight and a half to the dollar and Hispanics hadn't been invented yet—just lazy, thieving Mexicans, and the cops were still those big-bellied buffoons who couldn't catch Zorro with a net. And none of my friends had been anywhere either, except Rick Highley, a high school vodka buddy who'd been a machine gunner in Cu Chi, down by Saigon. When Rick came home, he got off the bird in Honolulu to stretch and smoke and he never got back on.

What I had been was a kid in a little town called Colton. I'd smacked baseballs all over that town, run half-naked and berry-brown through the summers of my small years, lived an ordinary life of science fairs and misdemeanors. It was fifty miles to the sea and half of one to Jenny.

I had to grow up to get to her; she was only a year younger. And dressed herself in miracle weaves and airthin cotton, simple as feedsacks, patterned in rosebuds and peonies. Everything she wore slid across her body like chocolate across the tongue, the bump of her bra-strap as pronounced and as promising as another woman's stiffened nipple.

It was no easy business, keeping my hands off her, nor did I make any great effort. But she managed me perfectly, and could stop my heart with a kiss, all the while escaping my clumsy, groping assaults.

And when she liked, Jenny slipped easily into the tawny hide of a sleek unforgiving jungle cat, surveyed me coolly through pale yellow moonlight eyes slit thin, the rumbling purr, the quiet speculation. I learned her claws; she learned my vast blunt stupidity, and there were plenty of days when I just went surfing instead.

In Mexico, where the surf is better, I knew where I could buy a Sparkletts bottle of tequila for four bucks, bring it back to San Miguel or Stacks or Cannery or any beach at all. And sit around a bonfire with a dozen-plus summer children from the States, passing around the bottle, the dope, the dubious food. These were the years of willing girls in breakaway swim suits, but I most often wound up sleeping alone in the sand, rising early to shake the mezcal from my head in the morning tide, musing to myself that daylight was seldom kind to last night's sandy little temptresses.

I stuck with Jenny and she with me and we had been engaged for three and a half years with one to go before I walked in one night and called it off, as brutally as I could manage. Called all of it off—the ceremony, the promise, the love. She just stared.

When I reached for her, she said, Don't touch me. I would later learn that when a woman says these words, the game is pretty well up.

It's the war, I wanted to say. Don't you see? I wanted to say. You want to marry a body in a bag? I wanted to say.

But of course I never said a thing. I guess I'd said enough.

#

Three wooden steps led down to the sand. A chain blocked the way. I remembered visiting Muir Woods, north of Sausalito, the first forest I ever saw that was equipped with turnstiles.

I unhooked the chain and stepped down, which was surely a felony or mortal sin in those parts. And found the sand grittier than in the West, dirtier. The sea was nearer than it ought to have been, and I had a sense that the entire arrangement had been badly managed, one of Detroit's Friday cars.

But I, Turner, walked out bravely onto those billions of imperfect granules, for I, Turner, had been trained to fear nothing—neither hippies nor gooks nor unpolished brass; I, Turner, would complete my appointed rounds, my advanced training, my dizzying dance through the Officers Ball, an infinity of nincompoops pinned up in their dress blues and nasty diapers, swirling around the floor to the mad strains of Strauss and Wagner and Jimi Hendrix and the clean smart rat-a-tat one might expect from the Andrews Sisters, if one didn't know it was instead a rousing chorus of AK-47s in the bush. I feared no sand, however fouled.

And found my way to a likely enough lookout some ten meters from the waterline. I had no almanac, but if I knew anything, and I bet I did, I knew the ocean. The tide had come and gone, sloshed on back to Reykjavik or Marseilles or the island of a man made wealthy by war, a self-made man in the American lexicon, a man, in fact, as cruel as Henry Ford, as rapacious as a Rockefeller, as arrogant in his wealth as DuPont, the blasting powder magnate gone chemical.

The sky lit up and, though I knew better, I raised my head eagerly. False dawn. I watched it come and go and, settling in for the darkest hour, perhaps a little less, sat and scooped out a small round resting place for my mug.

I drank some, and got another cigarette.

#

I never saw Jenny again. I tried. I would call and say, dinner? Omar Sharif? Do you have any idea how much . . . ?

Three months after I quit her door amid a hail of silence, she married a basketball player and that was that. I saw her photo in the hometown paper, beaming in her gown, which the article said was fashioned from taffeta, organdy, aluminum foil, all that crap they make sure you know to the last goddamned detail. The article went on to say that the cake was tasty and that Jenny shrieked in ecstasy that night in bed.

After that I spent a lot of time in the desert. Alone, like Jesus. Every visit, three or four days worth, spun my head around but eventually settled me down. The desert is so enormous that it diminishes you; it shrinks your ego to a deflated balloon from last month's circus. You lose yourself and you lose your problems and you find a certain saintliness in being alone. Days pass, the stunning silence at last induces a welcome psychosis, and there is comfort in the inevitable hallucinations, when they arrive: the lion and the fire, and a fingernail moon reflected in some mirror pond.

Even if Christ had taken the baggage of sins into the wilderness with him, even if he first shoplifted a container of yogurt or smote a particularly snotty Pharisee or kept a copy of Playboy under his bed, the sheer size and fire of the desert would have leached those sins out of him before Satan could show up with his snake-oil bag of shoddy temptations. I sometimes wonder how Satan does any business at all in Las Vegas. It must be the air-conditioning.

Satan didn't bother with me at all, didn't even send a lieutenant. Bigger fish to fry, or tougher prospects than a man who was off to war soon enough, who was bound to do his share of the killing anyway.

Time is arbitrary out there. I sometimes marked the time by drawing a line in the sand with my finger at the end of a shadow: cactus, stone, Joshua tree. After settling into thought for, oh, an hour, I'd look and find that the shadow had moved a foot or that the shadow hadn't moved at all. By that I mean: not at all.

I remember waking once to find that my sleeping bag was powdered with snow. It hadn't fallen on me, but had blown over the fruited mountain, San Gorgonio, amongst whose gigantic roots I'd camped. I felt sanctified by the whiteness, but only until I slid naked from the bag and scrambled into my clothes and cursed the cold and made a fire and boiled coffee and burned my lips on the cup and never ever guessed at the echoes that from that moment would reverberate down through the months and years of my perfectly ordinary whacked-out life.

#

A seagull stalked about in the shallow water washing up onto the beach. It looked pissed off. I believe it was hunting soft-shelled crabs in the small surf's remnants and enjoying no luck at all.

Wrong coast, I told the gull. You want California. Billion trillion crabs. Crabs everywhere. Crabs up your ass, Jack.

I'd often fished in the early-morning surf, so I spoke with some authority. When a wave retreats, you see the wet sand dimple and you plunge your fingers into it and produce a crab. And hook the poor devil with no more thought than if you were killing a man, a Communist, an ethnic other, and toss it out to fetch you a perch or one of those damnable sand sharks.

If it's a shark, you cut it up with your bayonet, slice bright ribbons of pain into the motherfucker's body and stake him out to scream and you lay back in the bush and wait to see who comes for him. You put out the mines and you tie off the tripwires and you do them just as dirty as you can, because you leave those little yellow bastards standing, they'll kill you, and they'll kill your buddy, and they'll kill your family, and your dog, and the girl you loved before she married that goddamned basketball player.

I closed my eyes again. I cried again. Shit. I stubbed my cigarette into the filthy sand and fished out another. Perhaps the Army's most useful advanced training had instructed me in the art of lighting a cigarette from a book of matches, one-handed.

The bird watched me perform this illusion. Black eyes, showing nothing more than hostility. Jenny had ocean eyes: blue, green, gray—they were like those mood rings somebody invented once, and just depended on the state of her heart. Her eyes were a mathematical function of her heart, in that mystical way that comes to women as naturally as their periods.

I think it's all related.

#

I'd so often seen the sun fall into the Pacific, a slight sizzle and it was gone. And watched the sky warm from blush to hellfire, then fade to black. You almost expect credits.

I'd seen it from the beach, but more often from my surfboard, paddling around idly, well outside the biggest sets, a front row seat for the last show of the day. That scene stuck in my head, would stick there forever; it was my youth.

It helped me through my early days and weeks in the Army. It was with me in all that advanced training—lock and load, and see the sun. I sank into the certainty of war, and the western sun sank with me, peacefully, without a murmur of protest.

On the day before I was drafted, I walked over to Jenny's house. No, to Jenny's parents' house. I hadn't seen them either, since telling their daughter, basically, to fuck off. Betty, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed, resembled Fort Ticonderoga, though I didn't know it yet. George, former captain of the high school basketball team, hovered behind her. Neither regarded me with piercing delight.

I explained where I was going, and that I'd like to let Jenny know, if I had her number, or hadn't repressed her married name. Finally Betty, with some effort, parted her lips a full millimeter and said she'd tell her. I wished I could have stabbed her to death, but George looked ominous.

And they'd never let a murderer go to war.

I visited my parents that night. I wanted my dad to sell my motorcycle for me, put a sign on it at his gas station. My mother said little while I was there, and skipped the nightly news. I realized I was making her uncomfortable and went looking for my father.

He was in the back yard at that hour, the hour of tending tomatoes. He'd grown things all his life, beginning with cotton on an Oklahoma dirt farm. He had poured me my first drink when I was fourteen and he and I had together finished what he would call a job of work, putting down a concrete slab, a patio kind of thing, for a friend.

He had acquired the friend in World War II, by shooting him out of the sky. The man, one Harold Alvin, had been a member of the 82nd Airborne Division and had been falling from an airplane in order to help my father and some other men take a beach near Anzio away from the Germans. But of course they jumped at the wrong time and everyone thought they, too, were Germans, and just purely shot them all to hell.

And Harold, having lost a kidney but survived the adventure, later became a friend and the occasion would arise when he would need a concrete slab to put his barbecue grill on, and we did that, some men and I.

I found my dad ignoring his luscious tomatoes and watering a persimmon tree and some spider plants beneath it. He had little use for any plant that couldn't be eaten, but my mother loved them all, flowers especially: zinnias, raffioli, marigolds, phlox, hydrangeas, and all the roses she managed to coax from Colton's fringe-of-the-desert climate and worthless soil.

He looked up at me, then laid the hose on the ground and retreated into his tomato patch. I watched him frown slightly, bend to pick up a snail, and casually toss it over his shoulder, over a rock wall and into his neighbor's yard. And I thought, His neighbor's tomato patch?

Which man had fired the first snail?

I said, I'll be leaving tomorrow, early.

He nodded.

I stood there for a while, and couldn't think of anything else to say, so I stepped forward and extended my hand. My father shook it, and held it for a moment.

Well. You keep your head down, son, he said.

I nodded. That covered it, so I turned to leave. He said, Jimmy.

Yes, sir.

Keep your ass down, too.

I nodded again. Behind him, I saw the sun sink.

#

I stubbed out another smoke, dropping the butt back into the pack. The beach already looked like a dump; I didn't want to add to that filthy Yankee ambience. When I brought out my bag of donuts, the seagull showed considerable interest. I broke a stale donut in two. Bit into one half and tore off a piece of the other. I tossed it to the bird and it hopped sideways toward me to nab it and gobble it up. Seagulls are as wicked and shameless as pigeons. They probably break an engagement every day.

Her body was trim, complete, perfect. And mine so ugly and awkward. I was all loose ends, a tin-can telephone calling her from long, long distance. She came to a game once, and the shortstop threw me a sinking curve, late, into the runner, and he knocked me into right field, a concussion. The next day she held my hand in both of hers, pressed it against her breast, and suggested that perhaps baseball was not my game.

#

It is traditional to get stinking drunk on the night before you enter marriage or the military. I didn't want to, either way. I took a bus to Los Angeles, found a fleabag hotel near the Armed Forces Enlistment and Entry Station, and checked in.

Unfortunately, the AFEES had parked a lot of boys there for the night, to fatten them up for the next day's kill, and I spent a couple of hours in my room, listening to the drunken tales they'd evidently rehearsed for old age: the taking of hills, the killing of gooks, the supernatural reclamation of a tiny nation plagued by European priests and politicians for six hundred years.

Traffic was loud on the street below, Murderer's Alley, but not as loud as the Hare Krishna people directly beneath my window, napalm robes and pigtails and tambourines, chanting for peace and money, dollars for peace, give us your Social Security check and let us provide a little comfort.

I fled at last, and at a two-dollar cinema I watched Peter Pan and The Swiss Family Robinson all night long. Then I returned to my room and removed all of my facial hair and went and swore to uphold everything: the Constitution, my President and Commander-in-Chief, my President and Commander-in-Chief's sacred gonads, the Knights of the White Camellia, and of course the fondest wishes of every slack-jawed, beady-eyed political moron this great nation of ours could boast.

Then I embarked on all that advanced training.

#

The eastern sky was reddening, and I began to pay it some notice. Four seagulls now competed for my donut crumbs. I believe that they have secret channels of communication, and that word of a handout gets around real fast. They show up at the gas station you're working at, up from the freight yards and hobo jungles, and ask for a little money for white bread and baloney, they say, a bite to eat, and you want to help so you take it from the cash drawer or your pocket and the next time you see them, they're in the road, brandishing a brown paper bag with a green bottle of stale donut crumbs inside.

The thing is, you have to get past that guilt.

I remember when Jenny insisted, one Friday, that we go to a walk-in theater and actually watch the movie, instead of fogging up the windows at the drive-in, our usual date. It was Lawrence of Arabia, and I think she was in love with Omar Sharif, though it could have been Peter O'Toole. She was a little gaga over his big blue eyes.

Mine are plain brown.

Afterwards, in the place we parked, she was amazingly passionate. The cat fled into the veldt and Jenny flung herself at me.

I was offended. I didn't want to be a place-taker, some brown-eyed crash dummy for her usually constrained libido. I'd once seen Peter O'Toole playing donkey baseball in a touring fund-raiser, playing shortstop on the same goddamned field where that kid had thrown me the sinking curve, and I can tell you that O'Toole on a donkey is not all that great an infielder.

So I took her home, but then dreamt of that wasted passion all the time, as I had that night, until yanked into consciousness by the tin clock's piercing scream.

The sky reddened some more and the sun, our star, peeked over the world's rim to have a look. I closed my eyes for a moment and pictured the planet, spinning into eternity with its drunken wobble, rolling beneath the day's new fire, dawn creeping over the East Coast.

Rising.

I forgot all about the cigarettes and the birds and the donut bag and the filthy sand. I just stared.

It rose some more, the sun, and a streak of light suddenly darted across the sea, all that way, to point at me, to spot me out, to say, This one. This one is special, not like all those others, those stupid boys lost on some Asian trail. This is the one who will be spared.

And then I realized that, had I been sitting three hundred meters north, or a thousand miles south—anywhere at all on that wretched coast—the sun's bright finger would also have appeared to point at me, or whoever was sitting there: my Commander in Chief, or at the whore I'd met at Augusta's Shakespeare festival, or at anyone at all. We all think it's ours alone, just as we believe, by choice, in horoscopes and psychic hotlines.

I'm different from the rest.

And the sun soared high, burning through the mist, glorious and prophetic. Gazing into it, legally blind, I saw my father knocked to the ground in Italy, unconscious, by a round that had glanced off the bridge of his nose and then hurried away.

I saw the boys in that anonymous Hare Krishna hotel in Los Angeles, vomiting into a communal toilet, scared absolutely shitless.

I saw a small riverboat full of GIs negotiating a corner in little more than a stream, and running smack into a sampan full of Viet Cong, saw Charlie fleeing across the grass, arms and legs and lungs and hearts pumping, like mine, like yours, trying like hell to reach the treeline, saw a soldier flipping up the sight and taking aim and heard the soft plop of the grenade launcher, and watched those small men blow up, just like the plastic targets in Georgia.

I saw a greaser buy my motorcycle for nothing at all, first offer my father heard. He knew better, and I knew he knew better, and in his gut he knew that I knew. I don't believe he expected to see me again.

I saw the first shot in the Tomato Snail War being fired by my father's neighbor.

I saw my mother going to Mass every morning to pray for my body and soul, saw her taking long walks around town, stopping to exchange pleasantries with Betty and George, best friends one and all, then heading home to tend her petunias and portulacas.

I saw, in that bloated orange ball, a flash-forward: American aircraft carpet-bombing a desert, men hiding in bomb craters blasted out of the dunes, emerging with their hands raised, bleeding from the ears from the bomb concussions, smacked by the runner and rolling down the foul line, impaired. Perhaps this just wasn't their game.

Finally, I saw this: Jenny's husband beating her, in the happy anonymity of some grass valley town up in Northern California, where he was a schoolteacher and she was a baby machine. And eventually, the so predictably younger woman, a classroom assistant, all gone on hoops. There was no one Jenny could tell her shame to. It was a small, happy town, where you could walk to wherever you were going, banking or bowling or buying my father's tomatoes at a produce stand—she couldn't bicycle; she was pregnant again—and everyone understood about the bruises on her arms and forehead, and the torsion fracture in her forearm, that she had somehow suffered on the stairs. So frequently.

I knew that she loved her babies and was therefore susceptible to blackmail, that weird sort of marriage blackmail. And that he then ran off with his little dolly. I saw her in the bulbous red sun soaring over New Jersey, saw her humiliated, stabbed dead in the heart and I wondered, a little crazily, why she hadn't just jumped O'Toole.

At donkey baseball—raising money for crippled kids, if you can believe that—girls had twittered around him and all of them were Jenny and I'd headed back to Baja California to sulk.

I'd always known she was mentally fucking Peter O'Toole, or—I can t deny it—Omar Sharif. But honestly, I didn't care. Jenny would laugh, gone blue-eyed, and tiptoe to kiss me, and her little shift would slide up a bit, across her body, and I'd just get lost in slim thighs, in her arms encircling my neck, and I would thank God for the love.

Gee, I wished I was with her.

#

When I finally stood, the sun looked merely normal again, and the fog was headed home. I tossed my last donut onto the sand, leaving it for the birds to fight over—not to save their babies, nor a marriage, nor their tomatoes, nor the Jews, nor the capitalists, nor my youth—they fought merely because they wanted it.

And I headed back to my new old apartment, grateful for the ritual of a shower.

© Bob Arter 2004

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