Carve
by Robert Warf
Lee Hoover is the plumber we pay in beer. Booze. He prefers plastic vodka so he can get more from us. Then he got a wife and said he preferred beer. So we get him that now. Preferably Corona. Sometimes Victoria.
Lee shows up red. Sunburnt by booze. When he works he drinks Coronas and sweats booze. When I was little I used to follow him around and bring him beers to keep him ready for his afternoon bars, while he got our bathrooms ready for rental season. This was his job and this was my part of his job.
When I was little, I thought he was very cool. He did things my parents didn’t. Things I only saw on TV. Things I thought were very cool. Things I still think are cool.
My father is not very cool. My thoughts about this have not changed. He teaches drivers’ education and when he taught me how to drive it felt like he was teaching drivers’ education.
Hands at ten and two. Push and Pull. Three second following distance.
“One thousand one. One thousand two. One thousand two,” father says. “Not a fucking ‘nough.”
When I get home from swim meets he tells me not enough, how he always says it. How he always means to tell me not good enough.
I am not good enough.
I am not good enough for Natalie, although she tells me to shut up because she says I am. I don’t know about this. But I do know that being with Natalie is more than good enough. You see, a lot of times when you’re single you lay there in bed thinking it’d be nice to be with someone, and you think of being with someone, and you open Tinder or Grindr or something requiring little effort, and chat a little, and ghost a little more, and go to bed, and go, no, nope, I’m fine.
Natalie is great though. She’s wild. She doesn’t give a fuck. She’s a wilder fuck too. Too good for me. She makes me think I’m not good enough. That I’m not making her feel as good as she is making me feel, and I’ll ask her how I can make her feel better, and she’ll laugh, and say, “You can’t do it like I can. You can’t.”
I still call Lee. He comes over now and we drink beers while he works. I ask him why he came here. Why he moved out to Carova. He tells me he didn’t like driving in Virginia Beach. He tells me he’s a first rate drunk driver, but he doesn’t like the thought of being a little too slow and killing someone. This is what scares him.
Out here there’s no cops and only trees to hit, and Lee says he’s fine with that.
I’m fine with staying in Carova. Natalie wants to travel and surf. I say, “That’s fine, but we can do whatever we want here.” And she says, “That’s fine, that’s not fun.” She likes to tell me that it’s not fun when there’s no one around to tell you no.
But I’m fine with my father not being around. I am. And I tell her this. Natalie tells me I’m not alone. That she’s fine without her father too, but she’d rather travel and have fun.
Fun to Natalie is getting faced and going night surfing. Fun for me is being with Natalie, which means fun for me is getting faced and going night surfing. She likes 150 and fish boards. I like 100, but I do 200 because I feel I should for her.
Natalie loves carving lines in night glass. She loves carving any glass. Me. I’m fine with just sitting on my board and being out in it.
Out in the dark.
Being blackout and surfing night glass are two in the same. Truck headlights on the shore a landmark. Rolling waves rolling again and again. Crashing. You get pulled under and you roll with the undertow. The pull. You either go up or you go down.
Natalie drives up the dune. She wants to go for a night drive and I tell her I’d much rather go to bed, but she tells me I can go to bed in the passenger seat while she drives, and I tell her that’s fine. It’s always fine.
She drives past our house. Only two minutes past our house, before she makes a turn onto the sixth row, where she runs down into a drainage ditch. I tell her we should have just gone home. I tell her she was too fucked up to drive. I tell her this while looking at my truck in the ditch.
She tells me she’s glad it wasn’t her truck, and I tell her that she doesn’t own a truck. She doesn’t own anything.
“You don’t,” I say. “You don’t own one.”
In the morning I call Lee.
“Which toilet?” he says.
“Need a tow,” I say. “Went into the drainage on sixth last night.”
“I told you this is why I moved to Carova.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling her.”
Robert Warf is from Portsmouth, Virginia. His work can be found in Post Road, HAD, and X-R-A-Y. You can follow him on twitter @rwarfburke