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Marathon
by Scott Geisel
Bill Eckert ducked his head and turned his kayak into the wind. He’d
have to push hard to make it over the breakers coming out of the
southeast, perhaps harder than he felt he had the strength for. The
winter jet stream had been blowing in toward shore at a steady 20-plus
miles an hour since early morning, pushing in front of it a steady row
of waves rising three to four feet above the choppy gray-green surface
of the ocean. That wasn’t unusual for late December in the Keys, but
Bill had chosen this day especially well; the forecast wouldn’t change
for the next three days.
The water wasn’t rough enough to seriously affect the larger
vessels, but a small craft warning had gone out the night before, and
Bill knew that beaches up and down the islands would be nearly empty
of sun-seekers and vacationers until the gusting winds and driving
sand had blown over. And he knew that he would find no one else on the
water today without a powered boat. If you didn’t have a motor or were
extremely skilled with a sail, it would be all you could do to fight
the wind that drove against you and the waves that beat you back with
every stroke as you tried to pull yourself out into the current. But
that’s what Bill wanted: he’d chosen today to test himself.
Bill leaned low, dug his paddle deep into the water and pushed
hard to bring his kayak around the last few degrees to put the bow
directly into the wind. His shirt sleeves snapped and his collar
billowed up and battered him about his chin. Each wave lifted the
little boat up and wagged it in the wind, the water breaking up around
Bill’s neck and washing down over him in a cold, foamy froth.
He’d anticipated slipping out through the surf at an angle to
the incoming headwinds, but Bill realized now that the glancing degree
of the waves against the shore would push him back into land before he
could reach the deeper water if he didn’t take a tack directly over
the tops of the breakers. He hunched as low as he could to cut his
resistance against the wind and save his strength and energy. It would
be harder than he’d thought to get far enough out that he could turn
with the current and safely ride the waters out past the southern tip
of the island and into the Gulf. Probably, he thought, he’d be driven
into shore a few hundred yards down the beach. His fifty-two-year-old
muscles ached already and his shoulders burned each time he drew hard
on the water to try to move the boat forward.
*
What Bill recalled as he struggled to gain distance from the shore was
that this was supposed to be the time of his life. Just more than a
year earlier, he had retired with a full pension from the city garage
in Marathon, Florida. He’d spent his whole life in the Keys, his whole
working life maintaining the roads, signs, parks, and public spaces of
one of the largest cities in the archipelago, and now he was to have
the pleasure of spending the rest of his days relaxing and enjoying
year-round the luxuries of a climate most people would be lucky to
visit even once during their lives.
But Bill had lasted less than a week before he missed his job.
It wasn’t so much that he missed the work; Bill had always thought of
his job as a paycheck, not as the meaning or substance of his life.
What he missed instead were the rhythms of his daily routines: coffee
in the mornings at Leigh Ann’s Cafe, the simple act of pruning a tree
or spreading mulch or putting up a road sign, the solitary lunches
eaten on the back of the city pick-up on an empty stretch of beach.
Bill didn’t love his work, and it didn’t give meaning to his life, but
it did offer a texture to his everyday world that he found lacking
almost as soon as he parked his truck in the city garage for the last
time.
And once he stopped working, Bill began to slowly understand
that as he’d been quietly going about his life and his job for these
past several years, his wife Mary had by degrees been slipping away to
some place where he could no longer reach her. She had inured herself
against a change in their lives that Bill could neither understand nor
felt he’d been a part of. There had been no arguments, no nights spent
sleeping on the couch, no real sense of growing detachment that Bill
felt between him and Mary before he retired. He had just assumed their
lives together were slowly entering a new, quieter stage.
Their son and daughter had both moved away young—within a year
of finishing high school. Both had chosen the bigger cities and busier
life of the mainland, Charles in Miami and Leslie in West Palm Beach.
Bill hadn’t been sad to see them go, really; he’d known for a long
time that they both would leave for the greater opportunities in the
northern towns. He’d simply waited for his children to understand that
they must go elsewhere to search for their lives, and he’d quietly
helped them get on with it when the time had come.
All of this, Bill had thought, was simply where his life had
been headed, and he’d accepted it without second thought, the same as
he’d accepted all his life the wind-blown winter grit that flew
through his hair, into his ears, and that rolled around in his mouth
and popped between his teeth when he chewed. It wasn’t until he was
retired and spending his days at home with Mary that he began to
understand the toll it had taken on her.
Those first days of his retirement, Bill noticed again, for
the first in so long he couldn’t remember, the quality of Mary’s eyes.
He’d almost forgotten. It had been Mary’s eyes that had spoken most
often and most clearly to him during their thirty-one years together.
When they were young and dating, it was her eyes that told Bill when
the time was right to say “I love you”; it was her eyes that said if
you say it, I will say it too. And the first time he clumsily fumbled
with the buttons on Mary’s blouse, both of them cold and shaking in
the front of his father’s Chevy, it was her eyes that spoke to him in
the bright moonlight, her eyes that locked on his without hesitation
and said “yes.” And when he’d watched the nurse gently place Charles,
their first-born, into Mary’s arms when she lay exhausted in the
hospital bed, it had been Mary’s eyes that told Bill she had come home
now, that her child, her family, would become her life.
*
Bill thought of all those things, and more, as he and Mary spent their
first, mostly silent days together after his retirement. And he
thought of them again as he concentrated on the water in front of him,
struggling to calm the rhythm of his oars, to slow his stroke and save
his strength without losing the distance he’d gained from shore. He
focused on hunching low and rowing steadily down the backs of the
waves after they’d washed over him, then holding his oar hard against
the water when the breakers rose to try to beat him backward. Pushing
and resting, pushing and resting, in this way Bill hoped to build a
slow and steady progress before his strength left him or the burning
in his arms and shoulders became too much. He wondered as the salt
water stung his eyes and wet his lips what Mary’s eyes would say to
him if he could read them now.
*
In those first days and weeks of post-retirement optimism, Bill
watched Mary quietly and calmly. She was slow to interact with him,
quick to run to Leslie’s bedroom-turned-sewing-room or the kitchen,
quick to escape to the small screened-in porch on warm days with a
book and ask not to be disturbed. Bill felt an awareness that it was
he who was infringing upon the space Mary had built for herself while
he’d been working all those years, and he tried to be patient. But he
grew steadily more restless waiting for this new phase of his life to
begin, this part of his life he was meant to share again with Mary. He
was most anxious, he knew, to rediscover the language of Mary’s eyes,
and the thought of that raised in him a giddiness so long forgotten it
was like a new and wondrous treasure.
On the eighth day of Bill’s retirement, their eighth newly
shared lunch together, Bill could contain his excitement no longer. As
she had done on each previous day, Mary made a simple meal of grilled
sandwiches and soup at the stove and carried each item one at a time
to set on the table in front of Bill while he waited. Bill watched as
Mary carried first one half-full bowl of soup and then the other, as
she loaded one sandwich from the heavy cast iron skillet onto a plate
and walked it over to the table, then went back for the second. When
Mary made a fifth trip across the kitchen for napkins and silverware,
Bill fidgeted. “You want some help?” he said. “I can get the tea.”
Mary stopped where she stood with a hand in the silverware
drawer. “No,” she said. “I can do it.”
Bill fidgeted some more. He swiveled and laid a hand on the
back of his chair. The wooden legs scraped against the floor as he
turned. “You don’t have to spend the rest of your life waiting on me,”
he said. “I can help.” And he rose and walked to the refrigerator
directly beyond Mary’s left elbow.
“No,” Mary said. “You’ll just— I can—”
And Bill did in that moment exactly what he imagined Mary
would have said had she had the opportunity to finish her sentence. In
the cramped quarters of their small kitchen, Bill opened the
refrigerator door straight into the back of Mary’s hip. The impact was
slight, but it was enough to drive her forward against the open edge
of the silverware drawer. The drawer slammed shut with Mary’s hand
still inside, and she cried out in protest: “Bill!”
“Well dammit!” Bill shouted over Mary’s yelp. “I was just
trying—” He pulled the refrigerator door away from Mary and stepped
toward her, reached around for her injured hand. “Are you OK?” he said.
Mary pulled away from him. “Yes,” she said. “I’ve got it.” And
she turned to run cold water from the tap over her reddening fingers.
Bill reached for her again, and again Mary turned, twisting
her body almost comically away from his in the small space in front of
the sink. “What did you have to go and get mad for?” she said. “It was
me that got hurt.” With her hand still under the water, she reached in
with her good one and gently pulled and prodded the stiff fingers,
testing them. “And I told you not to.”
“I was just trying to help,” Bill said. “I was just trying—”
“I know,” Mary said, her voice thin and tense. “You were just
trying to help.” She drew her hand from the water and turned the
faucet off, then reached for the towel that was always hanging on the
oven door. Then she turned to Bill, now a few steps back from her
across the kitchen. “But you couldn’t help by just sitting there,
could you?” she said. “You couldn’t just sit there, like you always
do. Just sit there and do nothing while everybody just up and runs off
wherever they want to and you just let them. You couldn’t help by
doing nothing, like you always do, could you?” Then she hunched her
shoulder and pressed past him and disappeared out the back door with
the towel still wrapped around her arm.
“Dammit!” Bill said. Then again, louder, harsher, “Dammit!”
And he kicked the refrigerator door hard enough that he heard the
contents inside rattle and fall.
That afternoon set in motion the slow unveiling of a new set
of assumptions and discoveries for Bill, and, he thought, for Mary,
about the nature of their relationship. It began a laying bare of
something essential and fundamental about what they needed from each
other. It was a process in which Bill found himself clumsy and slow to
understand, and he imagined Mary must have felt shockingly vulnerable
with him bumbling about the place in what used to be her time spent
alone. But one thing did become clear to Bill in those early weeks
after he quit working: while he’d looked at this as an opportunity for
the two of them to regain something with each other, Mary seemed
hardly aware at all that his life, and so their lives together, had
changed.
*
In the little boat on the ocean, Bill was beginning to gain some
distance from the shore. Once he’d made it the few hundred yards past
the shallowest water where the waves were breaking the hardest and
fastest, he’d found it easier to keep his forward motion. Though the
swells were rising larger and more powerful under him, taking him
higher and higher above the natural surface of the water, the crests
were not breaking; and so long as they did not, he could make some
progress against them. Bill was learning to recognize the shape of the
swells, to turn his flank slightly into them as they rushed up beneath
him and not fight quite as hard, instead to quickly slip over the
peaks and ride steadily through the relatively calm aftermath before
the next wave was upon him.
His shoulders and arms burned less with the effort of pulling
against the force of the ocean and the jet stream blasting against
him, and the ache in his back was beginning to ease once he’d loosened
his knees, which had been locked ramrod stiff against the bottom of
the kayak. As long as he kept his concentration, he thought, if he
didn’t miss the beat of the forces acting against him, he might
discover a rhythm of the ocean that would carry him out to the smooth,
deep, fast currents he hoped to ride.
*
Pushing against the ocean in his tiny boat was a lot like trying to
overcome those mistakes he’d made the first few months after the
incident with Mary and the silverware drawer. Immediately after the
lunch disaster, he’d felt as if he had to make that up to her. But
he’d tried too hard, pushed his way toward her too fast. He’d tried
going to her, talking, asking her to come back and sit with him, to
finish the meal. And when she’d refused, he’d demanded, hoping that he
could force her back to him, to open up to him. And, failing that,
he’d felt the need to make up to her that misguided attempt at an
apology.
From there the cycle had been set. Bill tried harder to find a
way into that private life Mary had built for herself at home while
he’d been away working. He got more and more hungry for the closeness
they’d shared before Charles and Leslie were born, before he’d spent
thirty-two years working the same job day after day and slowly
forgetting, or somehow losing track of, the course of the rest of his
life. And as Bill became more desperate and demanding, Mary pulled
further away.
She began to hide her days away in the sewing room, and he’d
come after her. “You’re wasting our retirement,” he’d tell her. “It’s
slipping away. Come out and do something. Let’s walk along the beach
or go for a cup of coffee. Anything. Just get out for a little while.”
But Mary refused any offer, refused anything to do with Bill
other than the necessities—meals, cleaning, the barest of a home life,
and sleep. Always in bed, it was only sleeping. “You go,” she’d say
when he came to her, sitting among the bundles of scraps and squares
of material she claimed to be saving for a quilt she never started,
arranging and re-arranging them in constantly changing piles. She
never lifted her eyes to him. “And it’s not my retirement,” she’d
say. “It’s yours.”
As the days passed, Bill’s impatience grew with each refusal.
And he began to get angry—angry with Mary, angry that he’d quit
working, angry at hearing “no,” angry at the sewing room door that was
so often closed with Mary behind it. His requests become more
aggressive. “What’s the matter with you?” he’d demand. “What’s
happened to you? Are you just going to waste your life away in there?”
Bill was shocked when Mary finally answered him, when she
lifted her gaze from the tattered swatches she had spread across every
surface in the bedroom, across the bedspread and the dresser top, on
Leslie’s old desk and nightstand, and in piles on the faded red
carpet; it shocked him when she said, “It’s gone. Everything’s gone.
And I don’t know how to get it back.” She turned her eyes to him, wide
and reddening eyes that Bill couldn’t read, that he didn’t even
recognize. Not Mary’s eyes, he thought. These are not my Mary’s eyes.
And in a calm and even voice she said to him, “Now shut the door and
go away.”
That was the last Bill asked Mary to share anything with him.
He slammed the door and kicked at its base. He kicked again, and
again, and a fine crack opened beneath the knob and ran in a jagged
line down to the floor. Inside, he heard nothing, and he turned and
walked away.
*
Out in the kayak on the ocean, Bill was gaining distance. He was
beginning to understand the feel of the waves beneath him, and he rode
ever more steadily forward over the incoming peaks and valleys. As he
fought less hard against the wind and the water, as he instead began
to work with the natural rhythms of the forces pushing at him from
above and below, to give up something in order to gain, he felt the
resistance against him begin to drop. Paddling now into the deeper
water beyond the first shallow coastal shelf, he realized that he’d
never learned to do this with Mary.
*
Two months into his retirement, Bill took a job driving the tourist
train from the historic railroad car at the southern tip of the island
over the old Seven Mile Bridge onto Pigeon Key. It was a popular
tourist site, and Bill found talking to the tourists all day long to
be a pleasant release from the quiet of his house. He rose early in
the mornings and made his own coffee and breakfast. He packed a
sandwich and thermos of cold tea into the tiny lunch cooler he kept
tucked behind his seat on the train, and he was gone before Mary was
out of bed.
And their lives together got quiet again. There were no more
shared lunches, no more arguments and kicking of doors, no more much
of anything. Bill didn’t know if Mary still spent her days sitting in
their daughter’s bedroom, sorting through her piles of quilting squares
and scraps of leftover memories. In the evenings, he waited quietly in
his chair while Mary laid dinner on the table, and after they ate he
walked along the beach or drove to town for coffee and the hope of
some light conversation. She read or watched TV, he supposed, and they
went to bed promptly, and fairly quietly, after the evening news.
The tourist business stayed steady all through the year in the
warm climate, and Bill polished the spiel he delivered as he drove his
visitors the two and a half miles down the old, narrow train bridge to
the tiny island that had housed the thousands of workers who built the
seven-mile wonder in the early 1900s. The tourist train was open-air
and pulled two small cars that held a dozen passengers each. Bill made
a point to shake each person’s hand as they climbed on and off, and he
clanged his brass bell and waved at joggers and gawkers as he weaved
his way around them on the now-closed stretch of bridge. Beneath his
seat he kept a plastic pail full of lollipops that he offered up to
any of the kids who rode the train.
At work, his days were filled with talk, laughter, fingers
pointing as expectant travelers looked for dolphins and passing ships
on the water, and questions about the history of the bridge and the
islands. At home, his nights and days were spent mostly alone. And
while Bill was sure his and Mary’s lives had been headed this way for
some time, the poignancy of its permanence hung over him like a heavy,
intoxicating cloud.
*
Bill knew that the water beneath him would never reach much more than
thirty feet deep unless he got out the couple of miles it would take
to clear the shallow coral reef that surrounded much of the Keys—or
unless he reached the deep water channel that ran through the high
span of the bridge just south of the island. If he turned and let the
wind and the current draw him, if he held his kayak on a course away
from the shore and let the waves he’d been fighting carry him back in
the opposite direction now, he might clear the island and pass under
the bridge into the open waters and shipping lanes on the Gulf side of
the Key.
Once he passed under the bridge, he’d be carried away from
land; he’d no longer be fighting to gain distance on the water, he’d
have to fight to regain the shore. The crests would rise higher and
push harder against him in the deeper water. And still there would be
the wind. He might not be able to regain the land once he cleared the
far side.
Bill thought about how easily Mary had let him go that
morning, how she’d simply shrugged when he asked her if she thought it
was safe to put to sea in the kayak. “There’s a small craft warning,”
he’d said. “They’re saying nothing without a keel and a motor should
be out. You think it’s OK?”
But she’d only shrugged. “Go if you want to,” she said.
“You think it’s OK?” he asked again.
She’d answered without looking at him. “I think you should do
what you want.”
And he’d quietly loaded the boat on top of their little
Toyota. Then he came inside and without a word he kissed Mary from
behind on the back of the neck and slipped away.
*
Bill never hesitated once he turned the boat. He held his oar hard in
the water and ruddered the kayak toward the bridge. He sat straight
and tall and held his arms out to help catch the wind that was pushing
on his back now.
He gained on the bridge with surprising speed. The span of sea
that he had struggled most of the late morning and early afternoon to
cover was passing beneath him now without effort. He used his oar
simply to steer. If he held his line for a few more minutes, he would
clear the island and pass over into the Gulf.
*
Bill thought of the stories he told his passengers as he drove them
over the bridge to Pigeon Key and the old railway workers’ quarters.
He thought of when the converted railway line had been the only
driving route to the southern islands, before the new bridge and the
rush of tourism that had come with the last decade or so. How the road
had been so narrow that the highway department asked the city to put
up a sign, which he’d erected himself: Oversized trucks and vehicles
pull mirrors in before crossing bridge. How the bridge would crackle
during the day with the sound of broken glass from the smashed
mirrors, and it would sparkle at night with the reflections of the
headlights on all that shining silver. They were good stories, Bill
knew, and the people loved them, loved to hear him tell tales of white-knuckle crossings by truckers whose tire rims scraped and sparked
along the guard rail as they hugged the sides and passed horrified in
the high winds.
Yes, they were good stories, and Bill savored every one of
them as he drew near the bridge and heard the water slapping against
the nearest of the heavy concrete abutments. One day Mary should hear
those stories, he thought. One day I should take her for a ride on the
train. I should take her with me and let her listen to the stories,
let her hold out the bucket of candy to the wide-eyed children. I
should take her along, and I should watch. I should watch for the
timbre of her eyes. I should look for something that I still can
recognize.
The deep blue water was thrumming beneath the kayak. Bill
could feel the motion of it in his feet and in his back, rising all
the way up through his body. He had cut the angle of his boat
perfectly into the swath of the strongest cross-channel currents. The
time was now, he knew, if he wanted to try to make a run to shore. He
could still cut the kayak toward land, still try to catch the tip of
the island before it swept past him. He felt reasonably sure he had
the strength for that, that he could reach the calmer waters on the
protected side of the key without exhausting himself.
Those thoughts occurred to Bill, very clearly, as he passed
under the Seven Mile Bridge. He knew that if he didn’t turn in the
current now, he would have to fight to his limits for any hope of
regaining the land. He would be alone and drifting, pulled farther and
farther from the island where he’d lived and built his life, if he
didn’t have the strength to overcome the distance he was letting pass
beneath him.
All of this Bill knew as he let his tired body drift under the
bridge. He knew he’d have to struggle hard just to keep from being
swept away. That to regain the shore, he’d have to test his old body
and tired muscles to save his physical self from drifting to an
unknown somewhere he’d long been trying to keep his mind and spirit
from going.
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