Every Boat Turns South by J.P. White

I slouch at the end of the day on my parents’ front steps and smell threads of rain mixed with the musty tang of things growing and rotting in the same instant. I took a train from Ft. Lauderdale to Jacksonville and hitched north carrying two black trash bags of clothes. The wind off the Atlantic tells me I smell worse than day-old fish bait. My legs are so tight and tired from interstate walking I can feel them twitch inside a wobble. A low grade fever wanders my body like a a torched and rolling penny. If I had a mirror, I wouldn’t greet the man outlined in grit and stubble.
I got lost in a storm at the tailend of the Bahamas in 1980, and now it’s 1983 or is it 1984? I couldn’t say for sure what the day is, the month or the year. Flung up on my parents’ doorstep, I’ve reached the threshold of as much twisted sorrow as I can lay claim to as a thirty-year-old: I’m soaked in sweat with the thunder nickering, hoping my aging parents will take me in because I’ve got nowhere else to go.
I park my trash bags and stare at their front door. My wristbones search for any handhold. My body trembles from the taut indecision of what to do next. I lean forward and touch my forehead to the door thinking the termite wood will tell me what to do. It doesn’t.
When I do knock, I expect to find my parents mulling a cribbage board on the back porch of this cottage on Amelia Island, Florida; their purple-veined hands flying fast through the pegging of the count. Any harbor, even the harbor of deep-knotted pain, can be weathered with a deck of cards. That’s what my mother claims, but she’s not telling even half the truth. An only child, and a master of Soltaire, Kings in the Corner, Bridge, Hearts, Poker and just about any other game, she’s just as likely to pack a deck as a wallet into her purse. The cards always conceal as much as they reveal, I hear her say and I’ve come to think that phrase could pass as her byline.
My father will be wearing his blue denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up and his white floppy hat stained with paint and varnish. He might even be wearing his bunched-up blue cardigan even though the room will be damp with heat. My mother will be nattily pressed in white capris, emerald silk blouse with dolphin broach. Between them, there will be a scalloped glass bowl brimming with radishes, celery, olives, carrots. He’ll be drinking grape juice from a wine glass. She, two fingers of Spanish sherry. I expect to find them neck and neck on third street, each playing with the near-telepathic ease that comes with forty years of hiding inside a two-person game that banks on a secret blind account: the crib. The crib will save me, I hear her say, but the crib never does. Nothing saves her. Nothing is enough. Not God. Not sherry. Not all the boat travel up and down the Florida coast.
Their doorstep’s littered with storm debris. An unexpected rustling makes me jump. Inside a tent of fallen fronds, a chamelon stands as big as a dragon. I stare him down. He doesn’t budge. He and I have sized each other up somewhere before. I raise the brass door knocker in the shape of a human hand and let it drop hard against the wood. My blood jumps from my ankles to my wrists as I wait for a greeting, an answer, a cracked door, anything.
No footsteps. No voices. I hear only the Atlantic two blocks away jigging up the beach. I cup my hand over the brass hand and let it drop again.
I call out, trying to imagine what words will enter my mouth, then I say, “Skip, Mom, it’s me.”
I lick my lips, twist the doorknob, thinking it’s not too late to back away, thumb to the interstate, keep moving north. The door’s open. I step gingerly across a gray slate threshold like I’m stepping over jellyfish cast upon the beach. I let myself steal a breath after seeing Skip’s favorite print of two sailboats thrashing downwind that hangs on the foyer wall to the left. To the right, I see a vase of wilted flowers and a sprawled stack of unopened mail.
I call out again. No answer.
I see through the back porch glass, my mother curled in a chaise lounge. Her pink knees touching. Her hands hanging slack at her side. A figure of depletion. I look about the living room and see no newspapers, no magazines, none of my mother’s books or needlepoint set about like decorations. The only familiar watermark is a dusty collage of photos on the mantel where my dead brother looks out upon his world after his poolside heroics.