The Beach Leads All the Way to the Deep Sea, by Austin Ross

I looked at the baby—at Andrew—in shock. He sat in the crook of my arm, staring toward the corner of the mail truck. I felt an awkward and sudden blush of love for this baby but regained my composure.

Austin is a great example of one of the things I so love about editing journals: I first became aware of him a few years ago, when I accepted and published this crazy story about Nixon (going by Milhous, then Alastor, then Richard) and road trips and searching for yourself and trying to escape yourself and circus clowns and LSD. It’s a wild one, and I love it so much. In the years since, I’ve published him a handful more times, I blurbed his really amazing novel Gloria Patri (out this month!), and one of my favorite moments from this year’s AWP was another writer, when I asked how he was doing, replied “Great!!” and then told me Austin, in his new role as Editor with Harper Collins, had just accepted his book for publication!

This story immediately became a new favorite of Austin’s and I’m excited to get to share it!

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After my mother’s passing, I went to visit my father in East Newark and the two of us in our varied expressions of grief ended up bar hopping. This was unexpected but not unsurprising, if a difference can be said to exist between the two. But one drink paves the way for the next, and so we carried on through the night, and before too long had each tied a handful on. It was at the third bar that night that he told me he'd bought a boat with stolen money.

“There’s a lot you can learn about folks as a mailman,” he told me, going on to explain that you can discern their comings and goings, their little habits, whether they keep the spare key in the fake plastic frog or taped beneath the doormat. He swore up and down he hadn’t really taken much from people over his new career as a mail carrier. It’s just that it adds up quick, he insisted. A little here, a little there, and all of a sudden you have a brand new boat.

“There are only a few things people won’t really miss,” he said. “You’ve got to have that intuitive sense about what you can and can’t take before you even go inside. Loose cash—only up to a certain amount—and small pieces of jewelry, usually. Sometimes some other random items throughout the house, but the key is to get in and out without any trace you were ever there. If you can do that, then you’re in the clear; they’ll just think they misplaced it on vacation or something. But it adds up.”

I asked him if this meant he was a thief now, if he had fully committed himself to this new role.

“Not a thief,” he said. “Not a thief. These things are not for survival. They are to show the world I’m still around, to make my presence known.”

“But no one knows you’ve taken anything, right?”

“There is a karmic sense to it. It puts out a certain energy.”

We paused in a silence that edged toward reverence. Dad had begun speaking like this recently, and I still found it shocking. Since I was young, Dad—an elder at our church for many years—had dragged us to worship services and Bible studies and youth groups. To hear him talking about this different spiritual reality was unnerving.

“Your mother and I,” Dad began.

“No no,” I said. The bar was so loud that I wondered for a moment if I’d misheard him. “I don’t want to hear that tonight. Let’s not do that.”

“Okay. All right.” Dad went to the karaoke machine and belted out a pitchy version of “In the Air Tonight.” There was some minor applause and he returned to his seat. “Your turn,” he said. Then: “There’s a man over there with a cut on his arm.” He nodded to some distant corner and clutched his own arm in sympathetic misery. “Yow.”

“I don’t sing,” I said.

“They’re wrapping his arm in medical gauze,” Dad said. “I always thought I should have emphasized musical education more growing up.”

“I don’t know if musical education was really your main shortcoming as a dad,” I said.

This offended him, this alcohol-propelled truth escaping too quickly. He nodded to himself in that way I understood to mean he was horribly offended.

“I didn’t—I mean,” I said. “Come on.”

Dad kept protesting that “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fine, I understand,” but it was not. We stopped once more after that at an arcade bar, and when he’d whipped my ass in both Tetris and shots of Fireball we went home and slept it off.

The next morning, he said he was taking me on his route. I was still hungover as shit but figured that maybe it would at least start to go away with some caffeine and a shower. Turned out that Dad didn’t drink coffee (“gave that up a while ago, they get you hooked on it”) and the water in the building wasn’t working.

“That sometimes happens,” Dad said. He pointed at the refrigerator. “There’s some bottled stuff in there if you need anything. I try to keep some supplies on hand just in case.”

On each bottle was a label with handwritten notes specifying the date of purchase. My father kept meticulous records of everything: he saved each piece of personalized mail he received (even keeping the envelope it came in to retain the postmark); collected his thoughts and memories at the end of each day in a series of color-coded notebooks (green for spring, yellow for summer, orange for fall, white for winter); he even printed off and collated every email he deemed important enough to save (he kept in his desk drawer a separate file for emails from Uncle John, who was going through a nasty divorce and “needed some space to vent”).

He put on a Harry Nilsson record and danced to the spinning vinyl in his underwear. “Now get your stuff and let’s go. Neither rain nor sleet nor whatever the fuck.”

He'd already, it turned out, gone to the post office to collect that day’s delivery and had returned to pick me up for a ride-along. I’d managed to find a small can of Diet Coke nestled in the back of his fridge with a note indicating it had been purchased two months ago and clung to it as though it were my true savior. I sipped at the Coke and felt the slow reestablishment of normality. After a time, I rotated the can to show my father the label. “You’re still doing this,” I said.

“It’s important to remember as much as one can in this life,” he said. “Life is fleeting.”

“You didn’t call me on my birthday,” I said. “All these notes, and it took you a week to remember.”

“You know,” Dad said, and then paused like he imagined I knew what he was about to say. I didn’t. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Glad one of us is.”

“I mean what we talked about last night. You mentioning my various shortcomings as a father.”

“That was a joke,” I said, though it was not. “I only half-remember saying that, anyway.”

“Many a truth is said in jest,” Dad said. “You spoke some of that to me last night and I saw myself for who I really was.”

“That seems a little dramatic.”

“We all need a little more drama in our lives. I want to show you something.”

He took me downstairs to his waiting mail truck and motioned for me to get inside. I tripped on the metal ledge beneath the sliding door and nearly fell but recovered at the last moment. Inside was a pile of fresh kitchen towels. Dad always kept a supply of them in the truck in case he needed to wipe up any spillage from the packages—you never knew what people were boxing up and mailing these days. Dad had told me he’d seen things range from glass jars of honey which shattered en route to milk cartons full of some sort of suspicious yellow liquid. Off to one side was an array of cream-colored waffle letter boxes for different neighborhoods, each with added notes from my father: “Drew’s son is just out of surgery,” “Felicia thinks she’s found Jesus and has decided to adopt a cat,” “Malcolm ≠ Derek. They are DIFFERENT PEOPLE.”

“These are to help me remember,” Dad said. “There’s a lot that goes on in a neighborhood. I have to be attentive to it all.”

“So you can break in?”

“I’m beginning to wonder if I should have told you that. That’s reserved for the rich snobs. It’s not even noticeable. It’s practically altruistic to take their money. But I would appreciate it if you would keep that between us for the time being.”

“‘For the time being,’” I said. “Is there a time when you’d want me to share it with others? Some sort of national amnesty day?”

“Just grab a seat,” he said.

I quickly realized the oddness of the setup: the driver’s seat was on the righthand side and there was no passenger seat, only a large metal tray with more waffle boxes. In the back of the truck up against the wall was a foldable seat with a brown foam cushion that had seen better days. I folded it down and it clicked into place. From here, I could see through to the front of the truck where my father took his seat behind the steering wheel.

“This is not what I signed up for,” I said.

“You can say that again,” Dad said. “Buckle up; safety first.”

The seatbelt was reminiscent of the ones on airplanes, a simple belt strap with silver buckles that clicked together. “I don’t want any part of your bullshit,” I said. “Nothing illegal today, okay?”

Dad sped out of the parking lot to avoid an oncoming grocery truck. The letter boxes seemed at all times in danger of tipping and falling but remained stable. As we drove, I was taken aback by the familiarity of my surroundings. It had been many years since I’d been home, but I recalled with sudden vivid clarity many of the buildings we passed. There was the library (smaller than I remembered), the old ice cream place (it must have changed ownership at some point), the old roller rink (now abandoned). Dad had refused to let me go to the rink with my friends. He’d been at that time obsessed with a kind of holy religiosity, and the concept of an upset God consumed his every waking thought. Roller rinks were centers of sin, he had said—idle hands being the devil’s plaything, there was no need for such frivolity. The father that I had now discovered all these years later seemed an entirely different person than the one I’d known.

We stopped at a few houses and Dad double-checked the mail before putting it in his thick blue bag. “You want to walk with me?” he said, but I refused. My headache was still raging and the rising sun was blindingly bright. When he returned, we moved a few streets over to another neighborhood. The house we stopped at was a little stucco brown place with a couple strands of ivy climbing the walls.

Dad paused and looked as though he were working up the courage to say or do something. I wasn’t sure what it would end up being, but we sat there in silence for a moment or two longer. Nodding his head to himself as though he finally knew what he must do, Dad exited the truck and walked confidently towards the house. “You forgot your mail bag, genius,” I said, but he was too far gone.

He strode toward the front door and then diverted to the surrounding wooden fence that led to the backyard. He gently clicked the latch open and disappeared.

I strained to see over the fence, but it was no use. So instead I settled back into my seat and closed my eyes. I finally heard footsteps running toward the truck and opened my eyes again just in time to see Dad jump in the back and hand me a baby.

“Here,” he said breathlessly. He closed the sliding door, jumped into the front seat, and drove away.

The baby looked at me. It wasn’t angry or sad or anything. It just had these big blue eyes that seemed to peer through you, like they were looking for something of more substance and knew you didn’t measure up.

“What the fuck,” I said quietly, still staring at the baby.

“That house,” Dad said, angrily pointing in the rearview mirror. “The people in that house. I watch them all the time. They are not good parents. They are neglectful parents. Child Services should really get involved.”

“Why aren’t they? Why am I as we speak holding a fucking baby in my lap?”

“Relax. Don’t worry. This is best for everybody. We’re going to take that kid to the police. We’re gonna do it right.”

Dad made a left onto Glebe, toward the highway.

“You say we’re going to the police station?” I asked. Dad had this look in his eyes. Something wasn’t right.

“We’re headed there,” he said absently, merging into the righthand lane and taking the exit for the 50 North.  Dad, seeming to notice the look on my face, said, “We’ll call someone. We just need to clear our heads a little first.”

The baby nuzzled into my shoulder then sprang back up, grabbed at my stubble. I attempted to shush it by bringing it back against my chest and awkwardly patting it between the shoulder blades. The baby’s quiet moans were punctuated by air being patted out of it.

“Man, we don’t even know what this thing is,” I said.

“It’s a baby.”

“I mean boy or girl. You know what I mean.”

“His name’s Andrew.”

I needed a moment to process this. I felt twitchy with nerves all of a sudden. Was he saying what I thought he was saying? “How do you know?”

“We couldn’t leave him there. I told you.”

“Who is this baby to you?”

Dad was silent as he drove, but his face looked tense. Finally, he shook his head as though in resignation. “That—Andrew is your brother,” he said finally. “Half-brother.”

I looked at the baby—at Andrew—in shock. He sat in the crook of my arm, staring toward the corner of the mail truck. I felt an awkward and sudden blush of love for this baby but regained my composure. There were words I kept searching for but they remained out of reach. The drive was silent as the rumbling mail truck carried us from the scene.

“I’m hungry,” Dad said. “Didn’t want to stop in town. Gonna get something across the way.”

“You’re hungry? We just—” I gestured around vaguely, as though to encompass Andrew and the road and everything else. “—and you’re hungry?”

“We have obligations to these bodies,” Dad said, and patted his belly. “We can’t just ignore them.”

“Nobody’s talking about ignoring them. Just maybe not getting a fucking hamburger while we still have this baby.”

Andrew, it turned out, was sitting quite pleasantly on my lap. I held him beneath his armpits, as though he were an explosive device that required disarming. Andrew rubbed his eyes.

“He’s getting tired,” I said. “We need to call the police. Call somebody.” I reached for my phone. Dad saw this in the mirror. With precision—I could imagine him reaching behind his seat for mail over the years, able to determine what was what by touch alone—he reached behind him and grabbed the phone out of my hand and stuffed it under his ass.

“Am I being detained?” I asked.

“Uh-uh,” Dad said. “No way. Not yet. We have to think this through.”

“Think what through? Why the fuck aren’t we calling somebody? What is your plan here?”

“I’ll explain. I can do that.”

“Can I have my phone back?” I asked. I felt like a kid again, asking permission like this.

“Are you gonna call somebody?”

The baby rubbed his eyes and yawned.

“He’s getting sleepy,” Dad said, ignoring for the moment my question, as though I had not just made this very point. He grabbed a waffle letter box from beside him and threw his cardigan over it. “That should do.”

“We’re not going to put it in a fucking box. Thing’s gonna slide all over the truck.”

“Then hold onto him. I don’t know. Figure it out.”

“Fine,” I said, and grabbed a clean towel from the back and wrapped the baby in that. He settled down into the crook of my neck and lay still.

“I gotta take a shit,” Dad said, and pulled into the parking lot of a Taco Bell. Instead of going inside to use the restroom, however, he spewed a long stream of vomit out the driver’s side door as soon as it slid open.

“What the fuck,” I said. “You feeling okay?”

Dad shrugged this off and motioned for me to come inside. I pointed toward the baby on my chest, now asleep, but Dad insisted. I tried to move, but the baby stirred on my chest again, and I settled back into my seat.

“I’ll bring you something,” Dad said.

In the silence of the truck, I could feel the up and down motion of Andrew breathing, the soft whimpers as he dreamed something unknown. I was jealous of this as we sat in the truck, and earnestly desired to fall asleep and dream as solidly as this baby for the rest of my life. To never wake up seemed not such a bad thing. I saw Dad emerge from the Taco Bell with two plastic bags in his right hand.

He slid the door open and handed me one of the bags. I opened it and saw a Mexican pizza inside. “This is the stuff,” Dad said, and bit into his own crunchwrap.

“How do you expect me to eat this in the car?”

Dad shrugged, mouth full, and pointed toward the plastic cutlery he’d placed beside the container.

“You think—” I said. A plastic knife and fork would not work with something like this even if I didn’t have a sleeping baby on me—but I was starving, I realized. I placed the baby in the letter tray; Dad’s cardigan cushioned it. Andrew grunted and stirred, then fell back asleep. I picked up the pizza with my hands and ate around the outside. I was hungrier than I’d anticipated. I scooped the bits that fell into the container and stuffed them in my mouth. Felt insatiable, like my stomach would never be full again.

“Goddamn,” Dad said. “Look at the champ.”

Dad picked up the baby and held him close. A look in his eyes made me curious.

“We can’t keep going,” I said.

Dad smiled at Andrew, bicycled the legs. He had an affinity toward this child I’d not seen in him before. “I wanted to call him Toby.” Dad said this with a distance in his voice. “She doesn’t take care of him, you know. The mother. Not really. She won’t let me near him.”

In my father I noticed a deep sadness and I suddenly wanted to talk about everything all at once. I recalled a time in my childhood when Dad broke a window with a dowel rod in his unspoken rage. I thought of how he’d left us for the undefined life of a bachelor that had mistreated both him and us. “You know, Mom never stopped loving you,” I said. “Not really. There’s a lot of shit that happened, but that never changed.”

“Do you,” Dad began, pausing for a moment to allow his voice to regain its confidence. “There’s a lot that I’ve done. And my penance is past due. I’ve tried to be good—you know that. But these things are complicated.” He turned in his seat to look at me. “I’m sorry I brought you into this. I was caught up in it all. The devil got his hooks into me.”

Dad took the trash and threw it in a nearby can. He paused by the can and lit a cigarette, flicked the match into the grass. Why Dad insisted on using matchbooks rather than a lighter I did not know. He was a man who enjoyed needless difficulty in everyday activities. This was a man who strung his electric guitar with the much less flexible acoustic strings because it required him to develop his finger muscles.

“I hope you don’t think you’re getting in here with that,” I said as Dad approached.

Dad considered the cigarette in his hand, its curling smoke. Stubbed it out underneath his foot. “I suppose not,” he said.

Dad turned back onto the road going west. The road was almost entirely covered by trees at this point, but when we finally emerged from the staccato bursts of shade and sunlight, the sky was clear the sun burned. “Beautiful day,” Dad said.

There were a few planes in the sky: a large jet off to the right with two white lines trailing behind, a few smaller planes—it seemed at times that everyone around here had a Cessna and a pilot’s license—and the faint buzz of a helicopter in the distance. A harrow dug through the earth of the field beside us; a hawk chased a sparrow.

“Don’t worry about it,” Dad said, as though reading my mind.

“I’m not worrying.” The helicopter seemed to be following us. I strained to look out the window on the sliding door. “You don’t think this thing is following us, do you?”

Dad turned down a side road. “Only one way to find out.”

We drove for a time through a thickly wooded area. The road curved and dipped for a time before rising and settling back. Finally, the road emerged from the woods and—just as I had suspected—the helicopter remained above us, though this time once the car emerged it ascended away from us, turning back toward town.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Dad asked.

The road was silent on this stretch; it was not long now before we finally hit the highway. “This has to end,” I said. “Stop the truck and let us out.” Was I an accomplice? I didn’t know how these things worked. But then a police car pulled out of a hidden side-road and followed us, lights and sirens blaring.

“Oh, shit shit shit,” Dad said, and gunned the truck.

Mail trucks were never designed to go particularly fast and we rumbled along like an asthmatic dinosaur. “This is okay,” Dad said, and the truck kicked into a higher gear as he pulled onto the highway on ramp. One lane was closed the whole way up to the 5, but Dad managed to snake through traffic and, just on the other side of the tunnel, pulled onto an exit that looped back under an overpass and followed the river. We drove for several more minutes before Dad finally declared we’d lost them.

“The boat isn’t far,” he said, settling into the triumph of the moment. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“The boat?” I said. “You think we’re going to go sailing?”

“They’re long gone,” he said. “Let’s go enjoy.”

“Dad,” I said pleadingly. “We have to stop.”

His foot seemed to hesitate over the pedals as though he were considering stopping the truck right there on the highway. Instead, he drove on, passing the exit and continuing toward the beach. We finally stopped at a secluded portion and watched the Atlantic Ocean wash the sand in hypnotic gusts. Parked behind a brick façade at the edge of the sand was a pickup truck, to the back of which was hitched the most pathetic boat I had seen in some time. The hull, once white, was now weathered and beaten so that it was nearly the same color as the sand around it. On the back was a single pullstring motor.

Dad looked at it as though it were a naval battleship. He climbed into the back of the mail truck and took Andrew from my arms, gave him an earnest kiss on the cheek before handing him back. Dad’s eyes were wet. He leaned across me and slid open the side door, handed me my phone. He patted my cheek and smiled. “I haven’t been right—really right—in a long while. But I just want you to know that I love you.”

I thought I could hear distant helicopter blades, but they faded in the swell of the ocean.

“I told you the devil got his hooks in me,” Dad said. He talked about Mom and how much he’d loved her when they first met, how infuriating and annoying she’d been but how she’d somehow kept him coming back time and again. He looked at Andrew, took a moment to breathe deeply. “I drive when I’m anxious. Always have—one time when I was seventeen and my mom was in a coma from the accident and I couldn’t bear to look at her face anymore, I hopped in our old ’67 station wagon and drove all the way to Ann Arbor. Got a burger at a place called Fat Pig’s Greasy Grille & Bar. Then I turned around and came back to Pittsburgh. I remember the black fabric of that wagon hanging down from the ceiling almost like sails guiding me home. My dad just about killed me, said I didn’t know what I was doing. Abandoning the family like that when they needed me.” He placed one hand on Andrew’s head. “Take him back, will you? I didn’t mean anything by it. I just wanted you two to meet. That’s all. Just the once. I thought it would change something, somehow. But it won’t. I know that now. This is all set in stone,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the world around him.

I was crying. This surprised me. Not daring to speak, I got out with Andrew while Dad carried on. He crowed loudly through the pickup window as he backed the boat toward the water. The hitch of the truck disappeared beneath the waves. Dad got out and unhitched the boat, commenced his journey toward the blinding sun. I held the baby—my brother—tighter as sand kicked around us from the sudden wind. Dad seemed committed to sail forever, just as the sand continued out forever beneath the ocean—as though he dreamed of escaping this life and into another, of sailing and sailing and sailing until he finally reached the sun, or whatever it was that awaited him on the other side of all this.

STORY:
Austin Ross is the author of the novel Gloria Patri (Malarkey Books, 2023). His stories and essays have appeared in Literary Hub, HAD, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. For more, visit austinrossauthor.com.

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ART:
Aaron Burch is a writer, teacher, artist, and editor, including of this very Short Story, Long. 

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Next Tuesday, we’ll feature an interview with Austin Ross about this story.

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