Gulf by Brock Adams

Author:Brock Adams [Adams, Brock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781929763443
Amazon: 1929763441
Goodreads: 8764322
Publisher: Pocol Press
Published: 2015-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

GHOSTS ON THE RIVER

The bay’s a ragged blue and white with the wind ripping foam off the tops of the waves. We’re at the yacht club, like we are every day in the summer, and we’re sprinting barefoot on the concrete dock. We’re running shoreward, past the sailboats floating in their slips, halyards pinging against the masts, past the long green yard where we play football, past the deck where our parents drink margaritas and watch us, we’re sprinting barefoot all the way to the window of the dining room because Horace is in there.

Horace is big and lumpy and worn; he looks much older than my mom, even though he was in the same classes as her up until fourth grade. He has short brown hair with a long, curved white line going from his left eye over his ear and around the back of his head. The hair doesn’t grow there. He’s at the corner table where he eats lunch every afternoon, and his mother–old and white haired and hunched–cuts his food for him, brings the fork to his mouth airplane-to-hanger style. She tucks a napkin into the collar of his shirt.

The glass is tinted and we cup our hands around our faces to see through. Horace’s mother doesn’t look at us. Horace does. Horace turns his head and the mashed potatoes bump into his cheek. He looks at us, his eyes dark and vacant. Then he closes his eyes and shuts his mouth so tight that little lines stick out the sides of his lips. His mother starts rubbing his head, trying to calm him down, but it’s not working. Horace opens his mouth in a big dark O and starts wailing this loud, primal-type hollering that everyone else in the dining room pretends not to hear. He does this and we jump and run away and laugh and call him a wounded walrus. Then we run right back out onto the water and off the end of the dock, yelling the whole way, concrete hot on our feet and then water cool and clean all around us.

My parents tell me it’s rude to make fun of Horace because he can’t help the way he is. He was a normal little boy, just like me, they say, until his accident. He was run over by a boat, chopped in the head with the prop. He almost died. His brain hadn’t worked right since. He’d never live a normal life or get married or have a family; even if by some miracle he met a woman, he could never have kids–other important parts of him had been chewed up in that hunk of whirling metal.

So Horace is supposed to be an example to us. Our parents tell us we should be careful, as if by saying these words we will do something different than whatever it was we were going to do anyway.

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