Later, I walk the beach. Here, close to the Georgia-Florida border, the Atlantic has a steely feel to it, neither cold nor balmy, brutal enough yet prescient of tropics close by. Three-foot rollers stroll in from the horizon, gathering size and lustre as they approach the shore, pounding in an ever-regular tympani of rise, curl, and crash, strolling fading booms down the shore.
A few others are out, a young man walking a shaggy golden retriever, a retired couple walking fast against cholesterol, a lone surf fisherman in a chair looking disconsolately at a pole stuck in the sand with its unflagging line attracting no interest in the surf (bottom-nets further out have scoured the area clean of fish). The early morning light raw, like the silvery sides of the fish that guy will not catch, grey and meaty and flailing.
Back when I had a family I used to get up very early every day to write poetry, before all rhythms of the working day. I’d sit in an easy chair in our living room with the window open to suburban dank dark and pour words in wavelike rollers across and down a page. It was like walking a shore, or watering one, milking some teat of the sea with a mind hungry for sea salt and the divine aura of blue waters at first light.
The real deal, I’ve discovered at this later date, is much ruder and solitary and silent, full of an empty magnitude. I would trade this entire Atlantic for just one more morning of finishing the day’s poem and heading upstairs to wake up next to Fran, there in our highly mortgaged bedroom in the middle of that profane suburb, hearing her sleep next to me, those long measured breaths incomparably deeper than any inked exhalation I could summon to the page. Her back to me, the long undulant curve of shoulder to waist to hips down to feet, eternally close to my hand, receiving my gentle stroking touch with something much finer than sex though intimately spooled through it, like a finer gold thread.
The light of that hour distills bitterly here, like vinegar, sopping the beach morning with an uncomfortably hard breeze, making the whitecaps of waves boil cruelly, as if no birth was here possible, only endless repetition. Ah well. I’d been walking an hour or so, getting ready to turn back around, when I saw something glint down by the waterline. The remains of a wave foamed up over it and then fell back and the object was still there, sticking up out of the sand like a proffered toe. I walked down and lifted up what turned out to be a heavy coin; washed it in the water and looked at it again and it was some kind of doubloon, gold no less, the markings on it nearly worn off, just the faintest tracery of empires long drowned.
All kinds of stuff washes up here, eventually, bits of spar and tackle from lost boats, plastic six-pack holders, champagne bottles, a telephone pole, a bit of fuselage from the Columbia space shuttle that exploded over the Atlantic 25 years ago, TVs and gas stoves and refrigerators, a 15-foot beached whale, naked dolls without heads, trees washed downshore from flooding rivers, house-timbers flung from hurricanes, stiletto pumps and lacy thongs, shotgun casings and a landfill’s worth of plastic and aluminum and styrofoam containers, empties all of past assaults and reveries on the sea, all remaindered eventually here to be discovered and hauled off.
There are Spanish galleons out there in the deep, split by centuries-old hurricanes, their vast booty littering the descending Atlantic shelf; now and then after a nor’easter, some of their treasure washes ashore. But it’s rare. The doubloon freights its heavy gold in my palm, cold, distant as Pluto, the mint of something tossed and lost. Brendan’s hair was like gold, catching the sun as he played in our back yards like a sail that turns light into something more gossamer and billowy, pure drammage of heart.
After he was buried next to Fran there was only whiskey, hell’s gold poured in measureless quantities down my throat. One day I sat in our obliterated family room, heavy Scotch glass in one hand, .38 in the other, trying to negotiate a frequency between the two of them, begging a way into there, reuniting our home. But I couldn’t pull the trigger. Maybe they wouldn’t let me. Today I believe it was a God’s grace, though that deity remains faceless, bereft of any theology other than I am a part of that blue divinity, like a fish. And He not so much a higher power as a deeper one, deeper even than the sea. I joined AA, put the plug in the jug and worked my wounded way on to here.
I turn the coin over in my hand while the waves crash and resound, alone with eternity. Is this a message from them, like a cup handed up out of the wave? Or is it some long-overdue payment which the $1 million settlement failed to settle? Is it too late to matter? Should I keep walking and watching the shore for the other coin, fitting both over my eyes for my final row home?
I stand there scanning the tide, but the sea doesn’t whisper its intentions. It never does. I pocket the coin and keep walking. Up ahead a family is staked out on the sand, obviously Northerners devoutly spending New Year’s Day at the beach. The man and woman in folding chairs, white as skinned whales, watching a boy down by the waterline pouring buckets of sand onto a large lump which may yet be a castle. The boy almost greedy in his hauls, piling those dull gold grains as high as they will go.
