Four years to the day, a big wave drove me backward off the breakwall and changed the course of my life. My girlfriend and I were on our way to the Skyway drive-in, the only one left in our town that hadn’t closed down. I was driving my first car, “the Green Monster,” a second-hand Plymouth Valiant that my father had paid $800 for me. I wasn’t wearing my glasses for no other reason than vanity. Drive-ins are as obsolete today as the etiquette of making out (quaint term) with one’s date, but in those days, it was an awkwardness to take off one’s glasses and start kissing your girlfriend—at least, I thought so then.
The car was packed with teenage males flying at us out of the dusk as I made my turn into the entrance of the drive-in, which was going about seventy miles an hour. I slammed on the brakes and stopped breathing. The car headed straight for us, swerved a few inches at the last second, and hit the front of my car; the impact buckled the hood into an instant sculpture in front of my eyes but barely moved my car when it clipped us. That was on Saturday night. By Sunday morning, I received a call from the A & B dock boss telling me I had my first berth on a lake boat as an ordinary deckhand. I stopped pacing in my house, wondering how to explain my damaged car and the traffic citation, and began packing. My parents were gone that day. I left a note. By five in the morning the following day, I was shivering in 35-degree temperature on the dock at Sault Ste. Marie was carrying the steel cable attached to the forward end of the J. Burton Ayers as we went through the Soo Locks.
It is an odd coincidence that something happens to me every four years to put my life or health at risk. As a twenty-two-year-old deckhand on a different lake boat, the Col. James Pickands, I was in Superior, Wisconsin taking a break sitting on the rim of a hatch cover of my boat when a dockworker operating a ten-ton boom for loading taconite lowered it into the cargo hold where I was resting. I hit the deck, literally, and saw the bottoms of his work boots through the iron scaffolding high above me. -Just the boots, not the man who casually could have killed me.
At thirty-two, I drove into a whiteout on Interstate 90, heading east toward Northtown for a wedding. Semis blasted past me despite the fact I kept my foot on the gas for fear of being rear-ended by one of them. Both my parents died that year.
At 40, I had a lump in my throat that turned out to be laryngeal cancer. The surgeon got it, but it left me without speech. I disdained the voice box they fitted me with as too robotic and inhuman-sounding, and, as friends, one by one, dropped away, I withdrew and remained in my home. My longtime girlfriend was last to go, but we parted amicably. The insurance company where I did actuarial statistics at first allowed me to work from home, and all the supervisors were sympathetic at first. Still, eventually, my disability caused a mutual separation. I received a generous payout, and between that sum and my monthly SSI, I could keep my house. Life returned to a new normal. Sleep eluded me, however, for a long time. I seemed to have developed a compensatory capacity for acute hearing, and with every sound in the night—a dog barking from three streets away, a raccoon rummaging in someone’s garbage across the street, a child crying in her room—I was forced to toss in my bed all night.
At 44, I developed a condition, my family, especially on my mother’s side, was genetically prone to as my brief forays into genealogical research bore out: phlebitis, pleurisy, and brain strokes. I remember seeing my mother’s exposed feet from her nightgown while she slept on the couch downstairs: red and purple bruises, big splotches with a zig-zagging web of veins over the white knob of her ankle bones. The nails of her feet were as yellow as rat’s teeth.
At 48, I slipped on black ice in my driveway coming home from the store and dislocated two vertebrae in my upper back. The Percodan, the doctor prescribed for me kept me sedated and almost comatose for months until I went cold turkey and learned to deflect the pain through meditation.
At 50, I lost two siblings within months of each other to heart attack and pancreatic cancer. My one good friend left from high school was killed in a head-on collision traveling to our class reunion, and the shingles virus made even the little sleep I could get without drinking myself into a stupor impossible. I woke before the sun every day and waited for the first rays of golden light to top the massive coal piles of the docks below my house overlooking the harbor.
My fifty-fourth birthday is approaching. It’s one more anniversary of my seiche. The rogue wave created by the same random/deterministic concatenation of forces of sliding molecules that comprise water everywhere in the universe can occur on any planet that is situated in the Goldilocks zone in its orbit around its star. Our moon and a rotational bulge help us immensely on our watery planet. Astronomers use the red-shift paradigm to theorize that every star of the trillions in the universe must have at least one planet in orbit. That opens up a theoretical possibility of five million in our galaxy alone. Astrophysicists tell us water is rare in the universe, and circumstances must be just right for it to escape its normal gaseous or solid state as ice permanently.
This is crucial to what I have learned in my life because it concerns that seiche and my best friend. Tony picked me up under my arms from the backwash and smiled down at me as I looked up at him through my blurry vision and what must have been a shocked look on my face. He’s frozen in time, haloed by a sun that cannot dim, laughing down at me. He had somehow dodged the wave and managed to cling to the backside of the breakwall. I imagined the wall of water must have curled right over his head like a surfer on a barrel ride. His face shines with one single unexpressed thought: We were in the middle of a great adventure! This blonde Finnish-American kid with a butch haircut. Like my youth, the buzzcut disappeared and came back in style in my middle years.
Erik Jarvi, as unrepentant as an animal, sexualized as a bonobo, and as vicious as a chimpanzee, lives his life in the same way now as he did when I confronted him about what happened to Tony at thirty-five. He’ll die of a cirrhotic liver, or kill himself with drugs, or a car crash—I hold these possibilities high, but I don’t brood over it or hope it’ll happen. The priest who arranged the fights for the town’s Catholic big shots died of AIDS. The priest’s deacon and protégé, who procured boys for these “entertainments”, left the priesthood fifteen years ago, married, and had three children. He retired from an insurance company and moved to Terre Haute in 2013. I paid a private investigator to discover his address because I meant to visit him. The rage was boiling in me to such an extent by then I thought I would go mad. I wanted revenge, but in the cold light of dawn, after I had made the preparations and packed my car’s trunk with the necessary items and equipment, which included a .44 magnum with hollow points, a shovel, two bags of lime, a knife and duct tape, I met a man at the door of his house, wizened by time and enervated by the pancreatic cancer that would take his life in three months. That white-hot, seething rage that held me in its grip for so long and had shaken me by the neck like my boyhood dog with a muskrat in its teeth finally let me go. It just let me go. I fell to my knees and cried for a day. I couldn’t stop sobbing until nightfall.
It’s the other imagined memory I have that scores deep into my neocortex, although it is a memory I alone created from the gossip and rumors the week after my best friend was lying on the bathroom floor of his house with a foamy purple drool running out of the corners of his mouth. He was ashamed because he was molested by people he trusted. There’s a bottle of drain cleaner near his right hand. I have thought of it daily for over forty years, wherever I’ve been. Milton once wrote that a mind is a wondrous thing; it makes a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven. So here I am as I have always been: caught between two worlds of randomness and determinism as we all are, stuck fast to a point where we wait to see what comes next.
-END-
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My Seiche Anniversary
by Terry White
BIO- Terry White was born and raised in Northeastern Ohio, Terry White has published several crime, noir, and hardboiled novels as well as genre and mainstream stories in various magazines and anthologies under such pseudonyms as Robb T. White and Terry White. Nominated for a Derringer in 2019, his crime story “Inside Man” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2019. Betray Me Not (Grand Mal, 2022) was selected by the Independent Fiction Alliance as a Truly Independent Book of 2022.
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TWITTER- @tomhaftmann
