Earl was a colossus. A man who seemed framed in lumber instead of bone. His true height was well over 6 feet. If he could stand this tall, he could have carried himself with that effortless grace reserved for certain people of great proportions. But Earl stood 5 foot 7 and appeared to be carrying an invisible burden that bent him forward at the waist, far past the center of his own gravity. To compensate for his body's unbalanced equation, he walked with his left foot ahead of the other, giving him a slight, sideways limp that made it look like he was edging his huge body through a small passageway.
The origin of Earl's stoop was a Jameson Street legend. It was the result of a bullet in the back, a wound received during a robbery of an armored car that Earl had been entrusted to guard. He was just 18 years old when he was shot, well before any of us knew him, a never forgotten though never remembered act of bravery that made him a hero. More so than the McDonald's father who had fought in Korea. More so than the boy lost in a bomber over France, the son of the man we called 'Grumpy', who himself seemed lost among the magnificent rosebushes he nursed in his yard.
Earl was Neal's dad, I was Neal's best friend, and therefore I was entitled to the status upgrades that accompany proximity to celebrity. There were also travel perks that included trips to baseball games, stock car races and on this occasion, a night time visit to a decrepit sports fishing pier.
I'd never been to the pier at night. Now the gutted fish didn't smell so bad. A salty mist dampened my clothes. As the three of us crossed the empty parking lot toward the pier, I walked on Earl's left, several giant steps behind him. Walking any closer would put me in his 'spitting range.' Earl was an accomplished tobacco chewer and his swift, wet rockets had to be taken into account when walking by his side. One summer day, Neal and I stole a package of his father's Red Man tobacco and hid outside behind some trees. The brown lump smelled so sweet; we bit off a thumb-sized chunk and began to chew. A bitter fire roared up inside our mouths and down our throats. After a minute of painful retching, we remembered the garden hose and sprinted across the brown grass to the spigot. We flooded our mouths with water, warm and infused with the taste of the green plastic hose. That Neal's dad not only endured but also actually enjoyed chewing tobacco only enhanced his reputation with us.
We followed Earl's pounding footsteps up the slippery wooden stairs. On the pier a misty green light illuminated dozens of indistinguishable shapes. As we came closer, the shapes took the form of fishermen, some in groups peering into white bait buckets, others in solitude, leaning on the rusted rail, watching their bobber's rise and fall, miniscule ships fighting to stay afloat in a terrible storm.
Earl caught site of a pier-fishing buddy in a red baseball cap and waved. Now Earl spoke to us for the first time since we left the car. He had a burly southern accent and spoke in a way that always seemed on the verge of telling the punch line of a joke. He told us that we could wander the pier by ourselves as long as we kept away from the "Boozy roughs" that hung out by the closed snack bar. Earl edged over in the direction of his buddy and we began to explore.
Neal and I walked towards the end of the pier. I imagined we were on a ship at sea, standing on the bow, pilots of a nameless freighter cutting the skin of an uncharted ocean. Neal broke the spell with a sharp tug on my sleeve. "Look over there." He pointed with his head towards a couple sitting on a bench. They were holding each other in a writhing embrace, their moans arching up just below the sound of the waves. Neal and I were frozen with excitement and tried to keep small and unnoticed. We watched as the man's hand gently lifted her beasts from her unbuttoned blouse, exposing them to the cool, wet breeze, the moon, and to us, hiding in the shadows not more than twenty feet away. It was our first sighting, and though I haven't spoken with Neal since the death of my father 30 years ago, I have no doubt that he remembers the moment as well as I.
Somehow we found the wisdom not to press our luck and slipped away.
Walking back towards the land end of the pier we were silent, no doubt lost in our own similar thoughts. On our right, we passed a man curled up asleep on a bench. His unkempt hair and beard were coarse and gray. He wore torn, dirty bib overalls over a filthy white T-shirt. His bare feet revealed hard black calluses and long greenish toenails. Though his face was chapped and sunburned, he slept with a pleasant smile. Before falling asleep, he had scavenged the pier for hooks, bait and fishing line and had gathered enough to drop four lines into the water. I looked down the lines and saw a decent-sized perch thrashing to get off one of the hooks. I felt bad for the fish but not for the sleeping man who had caught him. I hadn't yet been taught to be ashamed of such feelings, so I pulled up the old man's line and released the fish back into the ocean.
We both heard Earl laughing before we spotted him. Sitting squat and stooped over on a plastic bait bucket, entertaining his red-capped buddy and two others with the end of a story. When he saw us, he slapped his thighs, sprung up and announced that it was time to leave. On the ride home, Neal and I whispered dirty jokes and soon fell asleep in the back seat. Once home, Earl carried us like sacks from the car to the house. I think both of us were half pretending to be sleeping.
There's nothing I remember about the day before this night. Nothing I remember about the day after it. Years later, long after he had died, my sister told me she had learned the truth about Earl, that he had never been an armored car guard, and hadn't been shot in the back. His stoop was the result of a mule kick, an accident that occurred when he was a young farmhand in North Carolina. It seemed to be an unimportant detail.
09/30/2024
10:33:17 AM