Mr. Gravitz’s News
I keep entering short story contests and I keep losing. It’s so bad, I’m not even making the top 25. I think I’m done with writing contests and agent solicitations–with that hopeless game of who-knows-who. The whole business is a depressing mess–full of garbage (Snoop Dogg’s autobiography) stacked on pedestals and gleaming jewels flushed down toilets. It’s a connect-the-dots game; I get it.
And the winners are the pedigreed types.
Have you ever read anything by Lloyd Alexander? Did you know that his works were rejected so much that he nearly quit the whole show?
There’s something about a start line and a clock that attracts me–attracting me as much as the subjectivity of a writing contest abhors me; strong emotions indeed.
That being said, I’ve concluded that I may as well post one of my losers. I hope it gives you some pleasure.
It’s free–other than your life’s precious minutes that you wasted to read it.
This one is a “very short story.” A “very short story” is supposedly 3000 words or less. This one is 3000.0000 words.
It’s called Mr. Gravtiz’s News. It came to me while I lay on the beach this summer–dwelling on the true meaning of loss. How some handle loss; what reality really means to those who lose.
May you reject it as others have.
Mr. Gravitz’s News
By Duncan Larkin
Copyright 2008
A week after Wesley Gravitz got the news, after he’d had a chance to pack three cardboard boxes of his wife’s effects and sign reams of insurance papers, he decided to take his daughter, Francesca, to the Delaware Shore in order to get away from things for a while. He hadn’t told her yet. The whole way down to Hook Beach she asked about her mom and he lied.
“Is mommy getting better?”
“She’s stabilized a little,” he said, shifting in his seat, scratching his head, staring at the long line of asphalt that stretched ahead of him.
“What does ‘stabilized’ mean?”
“It means she’s in the hospital.”
“When can I see her?”
“I don’t know.”
“When is that?”
He tried changing the subject. Since Francesca was only 8 years old it was easy. He pulled the car over at the next rest stop and piled greasy French fries and little plastic toys in front of her; he made her laugh. He then made up stories about their great trip to the Delaware Shore. He said that they were going to build crusader sand castles (Wesley was an amateur archeologist.) and hop waves until their legs gave out. He said they were going to buy an inner tube and float in the ocean—licking frozen ice pops and resting their heads in their hands until the sun set over the cornfields in the west.
“I want a turtle inner tube,” Francesca demanded.
“Fine, it will be a turtle,” Wesley said.
They got to their hotel in three hours. It was called the Hook Beach Resort. It was hardly a resort and looked nothing like the ad. The innkeeper was an Indian man who ate barbecued wings and licked his fingers while he ran Wesley’s credit card. “Room 404,” the Indian innkeeper said between licks.
They climbed the stairs. The hotel’s off-white corridors were exposed to the elements. Their rails were hot from the summer sun. At the foot of nearly every room’s metal door were piles of beer bottles. College kids partied here; it was hardly a place for a newly widowed husband and his unsuspecting daughter; it was hardly the place to break the news. But Wesley Gravitz never second-guessed his decisions. He was a stubborn man who believed in fate and so he concluded that the two of them were going to stay all weekend in room 404 of the Hook Beach Resort. He had to tell her there.
Outside their room, a Mexican housekeeping lady shrugged her shoulders and said, “Lo siento; is not clean.”
Though he wasn’t, Wesley considered himself conversant in Spanish. He’d been on a few volunteer excavations in the Yucatan and could do things like order beer in bars. “She said she’s sorry,” Wesley told Francesca.
“Does she need help?” Francesca asked.
The cleaning lady understood English better than Wesley understood Spanish. She put the sheets she had been holding in her hands down on the bed and patted Wesley on the shoulder and said, “No, is okay.”
“La playa,” Wesley said, pointing towards where he thought the beach was.
“Si,” the maid said, nodding while folding the freshly cleaned sheets that would eventually rest on their freshly made bed.
“We’ll be back,” Wesley said.
“Come back, 15 minutes?” the maid asked, pointing to her watch.
Wesley forgot how to say 15 minutes in Spanish and just nodded. “Come on Francesca, let’s leave our bags here and go down to the store,” he said.
They descended the hot stairs and walked out into the sandy street. Wesley wanted to buy alcohol. It didn’t take them long to find that kind of store in that kind of town. He bought a case of Mexican beer cans. Francesca thought the beer had gold in it, because that’s what Wesley had told her. “Gold today daddy?” she asked.
“Gold today,” Wesley affirmed.
On their way back, they passed a tourist shop with an inflatable turtle that was chained to a rack full of lady’s sandals of various styles and sizes. Wesley had forgotten his promise to Francesca. He was ready to slip into a buzz and think about how to break the news of his wife’s death.
Francesca tugged at Wesley’s arm when she saw the turtle. Quick to oblige, Wesley threw down whatever it took at the sales counter.
Francesca thanked him and skipped away while he balanced a case full of 24 Mexican beers and an inflatable toy in his hands. Inside room 404, they lay down on their beds and stared at their rotating ceiling fan. The Mexican cleaning lady had left them a note in Spanish. Wesley didn’t understand it. Francesca liked the picture of the beach that the maid had drawn. “Is this where we are going?” she asked.
“Si,” Wesley said. He had already chugged a Mexican beer and was in the middle of popping open his second.
Francesca watched a children’s television program while Wesley got drunk. He drank nine Mexican beers and stacked them up on the bathroom sink like bowling pins. Francesco asked him if he was rich from all that gold he’d drunk. Wesley ignored her. He closed the bathroom door and sloppily changed into his bathing suit. He then opened up the cardboard box containing the Chinese-made inflatable turtle and blew as hard as he could into its three valves. It took him an hour to fill it. Francesca stopped watching the television to watch him in his final throes. Both the turtle’s and Wesley’s eyes bulged.
“Are we going to the beach now?” Francesca asked while jumping up and down on the bed. The television’s rapidly moving images reflected in her brown eyes.
Wesley sipped from his Mexican beer and nodded slowly. “Get dressed sweetie,” he said.
She stopped bouncing and removed her clothes. Her little body was white and supple. Her back reminded Wesley of his wife’s. It arched that same way. He wanted to cry; he wanted to tell his daughter that her mother was dead.—that she had died a few days ago in East Chester’s Memorial Hospital behind a gray emergency room curtain. He wanted to tell her that her last words had nothing to do with her—that she cursed God; that she threw down her ornamental crucifix while she convulsed and heaved and writhed in pain. Wesley had seen her die; he saw her pupils roll back like a shark’s. He heard her exhale her last breath; it sounded like air escaping from the turtle inner tube. He had signed the insurance papers and for the cardboard box that was full of her possessions—her gold evening gown; her diamond earrings that she had worn that tragic night. Yes: he even signed for the crucifix that she threw down moments before she went to the Lord.
But he didn’t tell Francesca this. He decided to drink one more beer and then usher his daughter out into the sunlight. He figured it was best to first float in the salty ocean and build crusader sandcastles. Then, at some eventual point, he’d sit her down and tell her. ‘At some point,” he thought, ‘Not now.’
Hook Beach was about a mile from Hook Beach Resort. While they walked there, they draped their colorful towels around themselves. Wesley saw himself in the window of a convenience store. “Look Francesca we’re wearing toga pictas,” he said, referring to the purple cloaks worn by conquering Roman generals returning for their triumphal parades. Vague historical factoids—mostly British or Roman Empire-centric, military history-related references–were always at the tip of Wesley’s tongue. He enjoyed dazzling people with them; he loved rattling off old, dusty things that no contemporary American understood: things like the names of the British Expeditionary Force’s three commanders during the Battle of Mons (Generals French, Smith-Dorrien, and Allenby), the number of British dead in the Zulu War’s battle of Isandlwana (52 officers, 800 regulars), and the number of British shells fired in the seven-day bombardment at the Battle of the Somme (1.5 million, more than all shells fired by the British Army in the first 12 months of the Great War). When his wife was alive, she shrugged when Wesley started this kind of pointless historical lecturing. She’d say something like, “No one cares about this crap, Wesley.”
He’d always respond the same way: “Someone cared—just not any more; it’s just me now. Taking ground and planting flags in the name of the Queen meant something back then. Now it’s all about populist crap—the deification of pea-brained celebrities and their narcissistic ways. It’s about skirt-chasing, buying things, and fornicating like simians.”
She’d laugh and shake her head. And then his frown would turn to a smile and they’d forget their silly exchange.
His wife wasn’t with them on their walk to Hook Beach and so Wesley got to make his vague reference and get nothing but an equally odd response from his daughter. “We look like animals daddy!” She was referring to the green turtle that the two of them carried while they dodged hordes of drunken college students and groups of caramel corn and ice cream-eating families going the other way on the sidewalk.
The beach was crowded; kids ran everywhere, kicking up sand that rained down on the backs of lazy sunbathers. Seagulls hovered like spacecraft over burgeoning cans of rotting trash. Chiseled lifeguards sporting red shorts and bug-eye shades sat on wooden stands that ran the length of the beach. One of the lifeguards stood and gestured robotically to another with his hands and arms. Besides vague historical facts, Wesley also knew semaphore.
“H-O-T C-H-I-C-K C-O-M-I-N-G,” he translated as he walked, nearly tripping on the green plastic turtle after he understood what was being communicated. “They should be watching the water, not for C-H-I-C-K-S,” he mumbled angrily, spitting as he spelled.
Wesley picked an empty space on the beach and unfolded the blanket. His arms hurt from carrying all their possessions: the green turtle, a cooler full of Mexican beer, a bag of cheese chips, and a rolled up Archeology magazine. While he unpacked; he felt the heat of sun on his back. He realized that he’d forgotten the sunscreen. He was always forgetting things. His wife never did. She’d have certainly remembered sunscreen—especially for Francesca. Wesley thought about trudging back to Room 404 and getting the sunscreen, but he didn’t want to put Francesca through the trouble. He knew that she was half Italian and that her skin could take a few hours of unguarded UV rays.
A woman sitting on a chair reading a fat book saw them unpacking their things and looked up from her book. “You should put sunscreen on that girl,” she warned. Wesley cursed.
The woman persisted. “That child can get skin cancer in five minutes you know.”
Wesley threw open the cooler and popped the top off a Mexican beer. “We forgot our sunscreen,” he said with his back to her.
“Moms know best.”
Francesca was listening and said, “My mommy’s stabilized.”
Wesley stretched out on the blanket. ‘Got to tell her after we get back to our room,’ he thought. The woman shook her head and went back to reading her fat book.
Francesca begged her father to come out into the ocean with her. Wesley stalled for time—saying that he needed to get warm first. (He really wanted to finish his beer.) Francesca tried again and then gave up. Wesley watched his little daughter haul the green turtle down to the edge of the beach and dip her toe into the Atlantic. He sipped his beer and put his pork pie hat down low over his head.
At the water’s edge, Francesca called out to him. He waved, gesturing with open hand he’d come to the water in five minutes.
The waves crashed down harder, bringing the water closer to Wesley’s blanket. The tide was coming in; the sun was no longer at its zenith. Wesley opened his Archeology magazine and began reading an article about the progress of excavations at the Belmont Castle (a crusader castle) outside Jerusalem. He wanted to finish the article and then he’d go into the ocean with her. He’d dig a Belmont-esque castle and then take her back to the room and tell her about her mom.
At first, Wesley checked on his daughter every 30 seconds or so. He’d stare up to make sure that the great ocean hadn’t consumed her; he’d see her floating on the turtle, singing to herself, and then he’d go back to reading about transits, trowels, and the bones of Saladin’s soldiers. Wesley drank three gold-colored Mexican beers; he checked less often on Francesca—assuming she was safe sitting atop her turtle at the edge of that vast ocean. After a fourth beer, he changed positions (The sun was unbearable.) and lay down—holding the magazine between the sun and his eyes. He assumed the lifeguards would watch Francesca. If they could learn semaphore, they could pay attention to the beach, he reasoned. He had once read somewhere that beach lifeguards were supposedly the fittest, most capable people in the nation. Their entrance exam was supposedly an all-day affair: a ten-mile ocean swim test carrying 100 pounds in rough conditions, a timed five-mile run barefoot in the hot sand, a two-hour exam with subjects ranging from marine biology, to semaphore proficiency, to emergency room triage. Francesca would be safe with them for another five minutes, Wesley figured. He reached into the cooler and drank his fifth beer and looked one last time at Francesca. She was still there on the turtle, laughing and waving. She saw him looking at him and beckoned him to come join her.
“Five minutes,” he mouthed. Then he lay back down and finished reading about Castle Belmont. His eyelids grew heavy. He listened to the sound of the crashing waves and took a few deep breaths. Happy kids sliding across inch-deep water on wooden skim boards screamed with excitement. A radio nearby blurted out a weatherman’s favorable forecast followed by a teenager’s clumsy request for some popular song called “Hold Me.” A propeller plane towing a billowing advertisement for Captain Jack’s Bar floated slowly over the beach; its shadow drew a thick line across Wesley’s torso. He let his head sag. The nerves in his hands and legs misfired, causing them to convulse involuntarily. He was falling asleep.
He did.
When he awoke, he wasn’t sure how long he’d been asleep. The radio still played, but the song “Hold Me” wasn’t playing. Kids still screamed with joy, but their voices were different. The supercilious lady who read the fat book was no longer sitting next to Wesley. The propeller plane was gone. Except for the fast-descending sun, the sky was empty. Wesley shot up and scanned the beach for Francesca.
She wasn’t there.
Wesley’s heart went to work; it pumped gallons of blood throughout his body, moving adrenaline into its smallest nooks and crannies. While running to the beach, he tripped on a bucket and fell headfirst into a giant hole. He lay next to a pudgy red-headed kid who let out a fart as if it were some sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. Wesley clambered out of the hole. Kids were everywhere: kids rode surfboards; kids threw footballs; kids bobbed up and down in the ocean, laughing and splashing.
There was no sign of his kid, Francesca; there was no green turtle.
Wesley screamed her name. A few adults nearby put their magazines and books down when they heard his desperate tone. One, an old man with tufts of ear hair, rushed to Wesley’s side and scanned the horizon using his trembling hand. The lifeguards caught on and stopped semaphoring sexual innuendo. They reached for their radios and jumped down from their stands. The beach became more turbulent than the sea. Parents suspected a rogue shark and ran out into the ocean to rescue their children. A mass of humanity crashed the beach’s exits—leaving broken chairs and half-eaten hot dogs in their wake. Kids cried while protective mom’s shielded their eyes.
Wesley reached into the ocean and scooped up armfuls of water—hoping that his daughter was down there in that dark, green space. Radios squelched. Lifeguards carrying handheld rescue tubes dove in. Two helicopters arrived, creating whitecaps while frogmen chewing on snorkels dropped down into the water. Boats full of fast-moving police officers with wide arms and tall hats arrived. The officers cast nets out into the sea; they pulled in nothing but broken shells and flapping fish. They all tried to calm Wesley, but they failed. He screamed and scooped and stooped and fell. Eventually the police had to get out of their boats at subdue him with handcuffs because he had struck a lifeguard. Eventually they had to stick a needle in his arm and push brown chemicals in him to make him sleep.
It took ten hours and one million taxpayer dollars in spent helicopter fuel and paid civil servants’ overtime salaries to conclude that Francesca Gravitz was indeed lost at sea. A child had drowned, but there was no body; there wasn’t even a washed up plastic turtle.
There wasn’t one because Francesca wasn’t there that day. It took a smart investigator, Officer Rex Fowler from the Delaware State Police to make the discovery a few days later.
No.
The finger-licking Indian manager of Hook Beach Resort never saw her and neither did the Mexican cleaning lady. Wesley did have a daughter; she was named Francesca and she did die. But she didn’t drown that day. She died an hour before her mother did. Her head was smashed in from the impact of the drunk driver’s car. Her mom’s head wasn’t smashed in, but her chest was.
Wesley Gravitz did decide to drive to the beach that weekend to break the bad news: He was there to break it to himself.