The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Shoreline Drive

A Novella

Excerpt B

Peter watched Spencer turn on the gas and push the starter.  The grill popped softly to life.  He unhooked the wire brush from its peg on the railing and began brushing the grill with the kind of casual authority that belongs to a man in the comfort of his own home.  As he brushed, he rested the tip of his boot on the lid of the big red cooler and looked out over the valley. He began to whistle a tune that sounded vaguely like I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.

Of course, Spencer wasn’t actually in his own home.  He was in Peter’s home.  He was in the home of his ex-wife.  He was in the home that he had designed and built and then abandoned along with everything else he had relinquished to Diane in the divorce.  But the paper facts of legal title did not change anything about the way that Spencer moved through the house, which, to Peter, now was like a shark moving through a familiar reef of coral: through the front door without a knock, up the stairs, through the living room with its photos of the current occupants, into the kitchen, sliding open the door to the deck with the side of his boot and out to the railing over-looking the ridge and the sunlit Cleatchee River snaking along below. Never a hesitation.  Never a deferential pause.  Swim, swim, swim.

Once he had set down the large cooler, Spencer the shark had swum back into the kitchen toward the refrigerator with all of its intimate reminders – Lucy piano, mustard, garlic, pay Jill, landscapers Thurs.—and there encountered Peter who had come downstairs in time to see Spencer carry the red cooler through his kitchen and open the back door with his foot.

Now, out on the deck with the grill hissing and the summer dusk gathering her dark hems just out of sight beneath the ridge, Peter handed Spencer a glass of wine.  Spencer sipped and promptly set the glass down on the side-table.

“Hope you like salmon,” said Spencer.

“Love salmon,” said Peter. “Don’t eat near enough of it.”

He handed a glass of Chablis to Nicollet, the olive-skinned, barely-legal, Mediterranean-born play-thing that hung on Spencer’s every move.  Spencer called her Nik and Nikki and sometimes Nico. She called him Spender. 

She called Peter, Pete, because that was how Spencer had introduced him back inside by the refrigerator.  Nikki, Pete; Pete, Nicollet, Spencer had said, followed quickly by where’s the birthday girl?

Pete. His name was not Pete. Spencer knew this, of course. It was the game they played. Peter would not give him the satisfaction of showing that it bothered him.  And Spencer knew that too.  In any event, Peter had not corrected the introduction.  He had been surprised to turn and to find her there behind him, tiny and silent and brown.

“This fish is good, yes?” she asked timorously, gesturing towards the cooler with her wine as if offering a toast. “This is good food?  Eating food?”

“Salmon? Yes, yes,” said Peter a little loud and a little slow. “Salmon is a very good fish. I like salmon very much.”

“That’s good, my friend,” said Spencer.  “That’s good.” He began making a series of short rapid, triple brush strokes on some charred detritus that was resisting the inevitable. “Because you’re gonna eat some serious birthday salmon tonight.  Not that farmed shit, either.  These bad boys,” he tapped to lid of the cooler beneath his boot, “are straight from the Copper River. My dentist goes up every summer.”

“Who? What’s his name? Ken Gleason?”

“Yeah. I designed his summer home.  Pays me in fish.”

Nicollet laughed, covering her lips with her fingertips. Her hair was black and sleek and short, curling in at the clavicle and leaving her neck and shoulders exposed.  She wore a tee-length sundress, yellow, with leather sandals adorned with a plastic daisy on each thong.

“I do not shit you doll-baby,” said Spencer.  “One good Copper River salmon is better than five-hundred U.S. dollars.  Maybe a thousand.  Maybe you should start asking for salmon tips, honey.”

“Spender!” she said in a soft scold, pretending to look cross. The patch of skin between her dark eyebrows wrinkled slightly. Bad boy, said the wrinkle.  Mama spank.

“And just wait ‘til you try my marinade,” said Spencer.

He stopped scrubbing long enough to look over his shoulder and wink at Nicollet. Or perhaps the wink was for Peter, who could not actually discern the intended target of this over-used affectation.  But he was struck by an awareness – and not for the first time – that what might be irritatingly transparent affectations coming from others, tended to translate as entirely genuine expressions when coming from Spencer. Perhaps it was the three-day beard or the unruly coal-black curls boiling out from beneath his nearly threadbare mango-colored cap.  Or the ruggedness of his frame wrapped in his perpetually tan hide. Unlike his fellow architects, Spencer had a disarming physical presence; like he was a star ball-player for the Caribbean Castaways. Or maybe it was just the flawless teeth – shark’s teeth, Peter thought suddenly – that hypnotized people into believing the sincerity of something as corny as a wink.  But whatever the trick of misdirection or sleight of hand that produced Spencer’s immunity from harsh judgment, Peter knew better than to think that anyone else could pull it off in quite the same way.  Peter was quite sure that if he ever winked at another human—even once —he would be instantly gored by a bolt of lightning. 

Nicollet laughed again, putting a little throat into it this time. Whatever Spencer had meant by salmon tips, she had understood.

Peter did not understand. He did not care to understand.