You don’t want to be up there, he said.
My father complied.
Bo opened up the throttle at the mouth of the breakwaters. There was light enough to see the swells out before them, rolling gray seas not quite capping. Lacy tatters of foam rode the surface of the water. The boat commenced a gentle arc, heading northwest, directly into the wind, and my father, who’d dutifully glued himself to the gunwale, holding tight with his left hand, repositioned himself in a crouch, leaning forward as the bow rose up, grasping the rail on the pilot console with his right. Just past Shagwong Reef, the chop picked up, and when Bo speared the peak of a wave, spray exploded over the bow, splattering their jackets. Feeney caught the icy shower with a whoop. He was seated on a small shelf at the aft. My father noted that one bad bounce was all it would take to send Feeney flying overboard.
Bo at the wheel was some kind of orange-hooded Washington fording the Delaware. His orange glove was steady on the throttle as they dove into the valleys, climbed the rising faces, and sailed off the crests, the prop breaking free of the water, the engine whining like an Indy car’s, before burying itself again in the froth when the hull smacked down against the surface. They were heading for the deep water of the Block Island Sound. If there were blues, that’s where they would be. This was as close as Bo Vornado came to nervous, this single-minded focus driving him toward the fish he’d promised his guests would be there. He’d will them into existence if he had to. Nothing was fun unless there was a chase, but he wanted to stay cool around the older men, so he’d gotten up especially early and smoked a sausage of a joint in the garage.
My father lasted about five minutes before he felt it rising up in the back of his throat, that unmistakable tang in the spittle accumulating on his soft palate, the popping in his ears, the den of snakes in his gut. His jaw went slack and the base of his skull throbbed. Nothing but a full stop was going to save him. The wind in his face did nothing to the sweat oozing from his forehead but push it stinging into his eyes. Sweat was flowing down the small of his back. There was sweat between his toes. Sweat on his lips. His flesh felt as if it had shrunk and drawn tight as a cured hide. His organs had disintegrated into undulating liquids. His eyelashes fluttered. No, no, no, no, no.
Retroperistalsis began.
In 1944, my father was admitted to the U.S. Naval Convalescent Hospital in Santa Cruz, California. It was there that, on an afternoon pass, he’d taken a two-minute ride on the Giant Dipper, a wooden coaster at the boardwalk, conveniently located just across Beach Street from the hospital. As roller coasters go, it was about as wild as a Shetland pony, but my father’s ride had been an adrenal Gettysburg, a real eyeball-peeler to the untold horrors his already unfriendly brain had waiting backstage, and he hadn’t been able to shake the eschatological specter that had shadowed him after he’d climbed out of the cramped car, heart racing and palms wet, a sudden hangover crushing his temples. He started babbling about Hobbes and Dostoyevsky to his date, who capitalized on her opportunity to escape when he turned around to leer yet again at the carnival death trap flinging another group of suicidees against the crystal-blue sky. Something had cracked loose within him, hatched and emerged whole into the light of day. It was the thing that had put him in the hospital in the first place, diagnosed as malaise—an aristocrat’s disease, a wilting of the spirit, an inability to sleep, treated with a Benzedrine/veronal dose pattern to reestablish the proper circadian rhythms—but now he saw that the thing had only been incubating, awaiting its monstrous rapture. He’d been insane to risk his life on that contraption. Even back on solid ground he winced as the wheels screamed and thunked behind him, the weathered wooden crosshatching creaking like a rope bridge over a gorge. It was the noise of imminent destruction, the terrible scream of an incoming munition. His eyes saw a changed world. Gulls hovering against the blue sky were agents of disease, the children’s cries oscillating as the coaster whipped around a turn nothing more than civilization’s death rattle. He had put his life in the hands of strangers for the sake of a quick thrill, to get the girl hot. What if some old carnie had half-assed his morning maintenance check, missed a loose assembly in the elbow of one of the oh-so-gentle sweeping banks, and though it had held for the first sixty-three rides of the day, a nut had been incrementally vibrating ever looser down the bolt’s shaft, and finally, at ride number sixty-four, it spiraled free of the last micron of thread as the wheels clattered through the turn, the little hexagon of steel ricocheting down through the superstructure like a pachinko ball, and though good luck and friction had held the beams together, it had been my father’s fate to be on the very next ride, the sixty-fifth, the one under which the crosstie had slipped, the rail distended, leaving the wheels of the leading car free to navigate the open air, and they all went plunging like a speared dragon to the boardwalk fifty feet below?
What if? What if? Of course the maintenance checks were half-assed!
Just because the roller coaster hadn’t collapsed in a splintering, shredding implosion of
