Pangyrus presents the second place winning story of our spring 2023 Fiction Contest: “We Own the Jetty” by Catherine Elcik.
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So, my friend Dario gets fired from Burger King for salting the same batch of fries nine times. Dario tells me when his manager canned him, he was holding the shaker in his hand, ready to do it again. Now I can see how it might have looked like Dario was playing a prank, but D’s one of those guys who can’t leave for work before he makes damn sure his apartment’s all locked up — his record’s five trips between his car and his front door. Most of the time Dario has his repeat-repeat thing under control, but it always gets worse when he’s stressed. Ike was shot in a Store24 two nights ago. That’s more than enough to wind Dario up.
Ike was a couple months younger than the rest of us; he would have turned twenty-one a couple months after he was killed. Me, Dario, and Pudge had big plans for that birthday — a Sox game at Yankee stadium, then a strip club in Jersey where Dario’s cousin swore you could buy skin on skin in the Champagne room. The tickets have been wedged under the molding by my phone for weeks. It was supposed to be a surprise. The morning of Ike’s funeral, I wear a dark suitcoat and a tie over my blackest jeans. I grab a few nip bottles from the kitchen. When I see the tickets on the wall, I take them too.
Outside the church, Dario, Pudge, and me wait for Ike’s girl, Shawna, on the corner. I offer up my cigarettes and Dario takes one; Pudge waves me away. Since leaving East Boston, Pudge got taller and thinner than any of the rest of us, but no one’s gonna stop calling him Pudge; not after all this time. We’re looking down the street for Shawna. Dario fidgets. Pudge shoves his hands into his pockets. I offer them booze — two chugs and it’s gone. We don’t talk.
I see Shawna first. She’s drooped against her sister’s arm, staring at the sidewalk; I’ve seen her looking better on days she was hungover and curled around a toilet. I toss my bottle into the bushes in front of the rectory and wave — just two fingers in the air. I know she sees me because she snaps her head up for a second before letting it tilt back to one side. She starts to shake. I walk toward her. Dario and Pudge follow me. We circle her. She leans on me. We enter the church as a crowd.
***
Ike and I met when we were thirteen-year-old fosters at Regents Hall for Boys in East Boston. When he died, I’d known Ike for eight years — that’s two more than I got with my birth mom. Ike had a thing for underdogs; he pulled Dario in with us first, then Pudge. He tried to get Dario and me to quit using Pudge as a nickname — “the kid’s name is Paolo,” he’d say — which was rich considering it was Ike who got people to call me Frankie instead of Francis, but Ike said there was no comparison. My name stopped beatings where Pudge’s name baited them, so we kept his nickname among us after that, but Pudge didn’t seem to mind. He was a smart guy, the kind of kid who pulled off straight-As in his sleep — Pudge made sure none of us failed algebra; we made sure no one at Regents beat him up.
It was Ike who figured out that the night monitors didn’t pay any attention to the entrance by the kitchen, but once we were outside there were nothing but shitty East Boston triple-deckers for blocks in every direction. I said we should hop the train to Revere Beach, but Dario, who was already nervously collecting all the litter he saw on the sidewalk, reminded us there was a state police barracks right on the water. “You never know which cops will ignore you and which ones’ll turn you in,” he said as he picked up a Dunkin’ Donuts cup and shoved it into his pocket.
Going to Winthrop was Pudge’s idea — he’d been with a foster family out on Point Shirley once and swore Winthrop at night was just a beach and a bunch of sleepy houses. Plus, there was this liquor store near the Orient Heights T stop that didn’t ask for ID if you paid cash — because I looked the oldest, Ike sent me in to make the purchase, but I came out with a fifth of Jack.
“We said beer,” Ike said, but I shrugged.
“Can’t hide a twelve-pack in my shirt.”
We took the 712 bus past the Welcome to Winthrop sign, houses with driveways, and a mess of convenience stores. Then the driver turned the last corner and it was nothing but ocean. Pudge signaled for the bus to stop and we walked down the hill toward the water on a street so empty, so quiet, so boring, I was ready to take my chances in Revere — screw the state police.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We gotta walk like we belong here,” Pudge muttered as we approached a man leading a retriever on a leash. Pudge waved at him, and the man smiled. Once the street was empty again, the four of us darted through an opening in the sea wall and scrambled down the stairs to a rock beach between two jetties.
I pulled out that bottle of Jack.
“Are you nuts?” Dario hissed. “They catch us with that they’ll send us somewhere worse than Regents.”
“The wall’s too high, jackass,” Ike said. “We might as well be invisible.”
Ike called these trips to Winthrop “taking the jetty.” Every Saturday we could scrounge up enough cash to cover the train and bus rides, we went. One night I stood up on the sea wall shaking a can of black spray paint.
“Put that away!” Dario paced as he fastened and unfastened the strap of his digital watch. “You’re gonna get us all arrested.”
The street was empty, and I laughed. “By who?”
I popped the cap off and sprayed WE OWN THE JETTY onto the concrete in giant, crooked letters. The four of us stood back to admire my work. Ike slapped me on the back.
“Yeah,” he said. “Fuck yeah.”
***
After the funeral, we sit at the bar in The Eastie waiting for the beer to kick in. After each sip, Dario wipes his bottle, then smoothes the wrinkles in his napkin before lining it up with the edge of the table. Pudge checks his watch; his flight to California leaves in a couple hours. Shawna stares at the television. Nobody’s saying much so, I ask Pudge about Stanford.
“You still farting around with those philosophy classes?” I ask.
Pudge sips his beer. “Psychology.”
“At least he’s doing something.” Dario straightens his napkin and lines it up with the edge of the table. “Which is more than you can say.”
I slap the Red Sox tickets on the table. Pudge picks one up and turns in over in his hand. Dario stares at his beer.
“Ike always wanted to see a game at Yankee Stadium, so I say we still go,” I tell them. “The three of us. Shawna too, if she wants.”
Shawna looks at us then turns back to the television. “You know I can’t.” She has some wedding or family reunion to go to that weekend. Ike was supposed to go with her, but it was the same weekend the Sox were playing in New York. I’ve never heard anyone yell as loud as Shawna did the day she found out I’d bought tickets for the one weekend she’d told me to avoid.
Dario straightens the remaining tickets into a pile. He looks at me and runs a hand through his hair three times fast.
Pudge empties his beer and glances at his watch. “I don’t know, Frankie.”
“What do you mean you don’t know? That funeral was bullshit.” I point to the tickets. “This is the sendoff Ike would have wanted.”
Pudge drops the ticket back onto the pile. “It just doesn’t seem right.”
“I don’t believe what I’m hearing.” I slam my beer against the table. “If Ike were here, no way he’d let any of us back out. Us three, the Sox, Yankee Stadium—Ike’ll haunt us if we don’t go. Are you in or are you in?”
Dario shrugs. “I’m in, I guess.”
Pudge glances at his watch and stands up to put on his coat.
“What about you?” I ask.
“I’ve got a plane to catch and finals to study for—you can understand that, right?” He holds his hand out to me, but I don’t shake it.
He hugs Dario, kisses Shawna on the cheek, and then he’s gone. It pisses me off that he’s weaseling out of the game, but Shawna points out he’s already dropped everything once to be at the funeral at all. I’d have rather he skipped the funeral and come to the game, but Shawna says I gotta let Pudge be Pudge, that he’s just saying goodbye the best way he knows how, that we all are.
Shawna knocks back another shot.
Dario lines the napkin up with the edge of the table for the hundredth time.
I wave the tickets between Dario and me — “Looks like it’s just us, man” — and slip them back into my pocket.
***
Shawna went to East Boston High with the rest of us. Back then, she had short hair dyed black, and she wore necklaces made of bike chains. The summer before we were in tenth grade, Ike had it bad.
“You’re wasting your time, man,” Dario said. “Shawna eats muff.”
Ike grabbed the bottle of Jack out of Dario’s hands. “Don’t be a jackass.”
Dario had to tell himself Shawna was gay so he could feel better about the way she shot him down at the beginning of the school year. The thing about Shawna was, if you could get beyond all the black clothes and freak jewelry, she had this nose that came to a perfect point, these big fleshy lips, and her eyes just bore into you—one blue, the other kind of green.
At first, when Ike started bringing Shawna to the jetty, she was just another one of the guys — she shared cigarettes, she laughed, she spit — but once she and Ike had been going out long enough for them to stand with their hands in the butt pocket of each other’s blue jeans, she changed. Suddenly, anytime one of us told a joke about some girl from school, Shawna rolled her eyes and told us we were pig fuckers. Then there was the sex thing. Whenever Shawna was at the beach, she convinced Ike to disappear with her to the far side of the jetty. We never saw anything, but when the waves weren’t crashing in hard, we heard plenty. It didn’t bother me much, but it drove Dario crazy.
After a few months Dario started climbing the jetty to watch Shawna and Ike go at it. Might have got away with it if he hadn’t insisted on opening and closing the Velcro strap on his watch as he crouched there.
All I could hear was Shawna’s scream and Ike shouting. Then I saw Ike up on the jetty beating on Dario. If they talked about that night at all, I never heard them. Dario spent the next couple of weeks with a black eye, and Shawna and Ike stopped doing it while we were around. By the time Dario’s bruise healed, he and Ike seemed like they were back to normal.
***
After Pudge leaves the bar to catch his plane the night of the funeral, Shawna, Dario and me do a tour of East Boston’s finest. By the time we’re done, it’s late, and Shawna’s the only one sober enough to drive. She drops Dario off first, then pulls up in front of my house.
“Ike was a stupid fuck,” she says. “You guys make out like he was this God. Gods don’t die at Store24.”
“Nobody really knows what happened that night,” I tell her.
“The fuck we don’t.”
I look away. In the security tapes they’d played on the news, Ike’s at the counter paying for cigarettes when a guy in a kid-size Big Bird mask comes in with a gun, points it at the camera, and fires. When the police find them, Ike and the clerk are slumped in a corner with bullets in their brains, the cash register’s empty, and there isn’t a carton of cigarettes left in the store. The way I figure it, Ike went hero and reached for the gun. Good-bye brain. Goodbye Ike from Maverick Square.
“Ike was a stupid fuck,” Shawna says again, hands on the wheel, head down. Her hair’s long and brown now — no more black dye; no more hard jewelry. Just a normal girl crying over a dead boy.
Outside, a group of teens laugh as they walk past the car.
I try changing the subject, but my voice sounds fake even to me. “At least Dario’s gonna go to Yankee Stadium like we planned.”
“Whatever.” Shawna cracks her window and flicks her cigarette to the curb, but then she’s on me — her tongue in my mouth, a hand on my crotch.
I go with it a second, before I push her away. “Jesus, Shawna.”
She slumps against the driver’s seat. “You too drunk?”
“Ike was like a brother.”
“Ike’s dead.”
“Barely.”
I scramble out of her car.
***
A week after Ike’s funeral, Shawna calls to tell me something’s not right with Dario. She brought him a lasagna and he put it in the dishwasher. Now he’s not answering his phone. Could I go and check it out? Dario’s meds normally cut through his neat-freak bullshit, but sometimes, when the world gets fucked enough, Dario’s record skips until someone nudges the needle to get him back on track. Ike and I saw it happen a few times; the worst was when Dario’s birth-dad died. He framed the one photo he had of him and his father and was hellbent on finding the best spot to hang it. When we got to him, there were a hundred nails in the wall, and Dario’s thumb was bleeding where he’d missed and hit himself with the hammer. Ike and me took the photo and left him with a bottle of Jack.
Tonight, though, Dario’s cleaning. I smell the bleach in the hall outside his apartment; inside, the reek makes my eyes burn. I open the window in Dario’s living room, then walk toward the back of his apartment. His bathroom is a nightmare of gleaming chrome. In the kitchen, Dario’s on his hands and knees pouring bleach directly onto the tiles. He puts the Clorox down, picks up a brush with bent bristles, and scrubs so hard his body bobs in time with his arm. He’s coughing. He could kill us both with a few drops of ammonia.
“D,” I say.
Dario keeps scraping the floor. His hands are red and chapped, and the knees of his jeans are soaked through.
“Hey,” I try again.
“The fucker won’t come clean.” His face nearly touches the tile.
If Ike were here, he’d tackle Dario, but that’s not my style. I snatch the bottle of bleach while Dario’s attention’s on the floor. I’m halfway down the hall before he yells after me. I jump into the bathroom and ignore Dario banging on the locked door as I pour and flush. When I hand him the empty bottle, Dario sucker-punches me and storms off. I stumble after him. In the kitchen Dario raids the cabinet under the sink. Comet and Fantastic crash to the floor, then Dario holds up the Windex. When he puts a finger on the trigger, I knock the bottle out of his hand.
“You want to kill us both?” I scream at him. “What would that prove, huh? What the hell would that prove?”
Once Dario’s calm, we open windows and take two beers up to the roof. The smell of bleach clings to our clothes and hair as we watch the mid-day arrivals scream into the airport — United, American, some puddle jumper.
“You OK?” I ask.
Dario wipes his beer on his shirt. “I think I’m over the worst of it, and then it just hits me, you know?”
“You gotta pull it together,” I say.
“Fuck off.” Dario turns his beer around three times in his hand. Each time he moves I smell chlorine on his sleeve.
***
I didn’t realize how many people in Winthrop ordered Chinese food until Ike died and I noticed I passed the jetty with greasy take-out piled on my passenger seat sometimes as many as six times a night. I won’t go out there, of course — I haven’t in years — but sometimes I pull over and take it all in.
The lights on the planes hover way out over the water before slowly inching forward, their jets growling as they swoop over the beach as in their descent to the airport on the other side of the harbor. My eyes drift to the rocks that make up the jetty.
Most of the time the four of us spent out here we were just shooting the shit, but once in a while Pudge got us talking about the dreams we usually kept to ourselves — Ike wanted to be a detective, Dario wanted to open a pub called Dario’s Den, and I wanted to be a pilot.
“Not that it matters,” I told Pudge.
Pudge’s face went red. “You act like we’re all stuck here forever.”
Pudge didn’t mean to be a clueless son of a bitch — he honestly saw it as a simple equation: work for what you want and you get it. Which was fine for a guy with a brain like his, but what was I gonna do? Waltz into the airport and ask where to sign up? Pudge might go off and do the school thing one day, but the rest of us would never be much more than the rejects we were back then.
These days I want to own a house way more than I ever wanted to fly. I stare at the tip of Point Shirley, a spit of land that juts out from the rest of Winthrop. This is the part of town that’s directly under Logan Airport’s flight path. The people who live there are used to the planes gunning over their crouching houses and the rumble they feel as the jet engines scream overhead. Houses out here are pretty cheap — I guess you pay less when you sign up for a better-than-average chance of waking up with a cockpit in the middle of your living room. Whenever I have a little money left over at the end of the week, I tell myself this is what I’m saving for — a cottage out here at the end of the world. But the last time I checked fifteen hundred bucks doesn’t buy much of a house.
***
A few weeks later, a delivery takes me by Dario’s and I decide to stop in — partly to check on him, partly to remind him about the Yankees game the following month — and find Shawna inside, which is weird. What’s weirder is they’ve just finished dinner. Weirder still, they act super casual and welcome me, offer me a plate — there are leftover fajitas and there’ll be hot brownies any second — but my stomach sours at the scent of roasted chicken mingled with chocolate.
In the kitchen there’s a picked over plate of chicken and peppers on the table. The salsa spilled on the floor is bright red against the white tile. There’s a dirty skillet in the sink. A mixing bowl smeared with chocolate.
On the counter, a timer ticks down a final thirty seconds.
Shawna squints through the oven window.
Dario pulls down three plates. He lines them up in a neat row, then stacks them, then lines them up again.
Shawna glances at me as she pulls on an oven mitt.
Dario keeps fidgeting with the plates, stacking them, lining them.
“They’re just plates, man,” I tell him. “Let it go.”
Dario frowns and turns to the sink. Flips the faucet on full blast.
Shawna pulls the brownies from the oven and sets them on the stove.
Dario scrubs the pans, water pissing everything.
“Hey, we talked about this,” Shawna coos at him.
“Yeah, cut the shit man,” I try.
The steel wool hisses as Dario scrubs all the harder.
I’m about three seconds from yanking that brush out of Dario’s hand when Shawna sidles to his side and closes her hand over his.
Dario goes still, but the faucet continues full blast.
My throat goes dry.
Shawna flips the faucet off but doesn’t let go of Dario’s hand.
When he leans against Shawna, it knocks the wind out of me.
***
We lost the jetty the night Ike turned seventeen. The big one-seven wasn’t much to celebrate at Regents — it meant we only had one year until they kicked our asses to the curb; Regents may have still been the same shithole it was when we all got there, but it was the first real home any of us knew, so we weren’t in any rush to leave it. Ike was drinking heavily — the bottle of Jack I’d scored for his birthday was half empty before the rest of us had more than a few sips.
“Here’s to one more year as a reject,” Ike said. Then he tipped back another long drink. Normally Shawna kept him from getting so trashed, but her shift didn’t end for a few hours.
We didn’t see the punks until they were on us. Their voices were deeper than ours; their stubble was thick. They smelled so sour, they had to have been at least as drunk as Ike. The shortest guy, the one they called Sal, stood slightly in front of the two skinny guys he was with. Even in the moonlight I could tell he was all muscle.
“Are you the shits who own the jetty?” Sal asked.
Ike staggered forward. “Depends on the shits asking.”
I stepped between Ike and Sal. “It’s his birthday, man. Give him a break.”
“I don’t care if it’s Christmas Eve,” Sal said.
Sal grabbed the Jack from Ike and drank. Ike swiped at the bottle, but he lost his footing and sat down hard on the jetty. He struggled to stand back up.
The men laughed, and I stepped forward. “That doesn’t belong to you.”
Sal took another long swig, then passed the bottle to the guy on his right. I stood up straighter. I stared him down. I could sense Dario and Ike just behind me. I held my hand out for the bottle. Pudge stood about a foot behind us all.
“We don’t want any trouble,” I said, and Sal laughed.
“Then why are you still here?”
In a low voice, Pudge tried to convince Dario, Ike, and me to bail. When we ignored him, he backed away a few feet. Then he turned, ran across the beach, and scrambled up the rocks to the stairs in the sea wall.
Sal took another drink. “Me and my friends are going down to the end of the jetty to finish this bottle — you want to be gone by the time we’re done.” Sal pushed between me and Dario; the other two went around Ike. We stared at them as they settled in to drink our booze on our jetty.
Dario picked up four rocks and arranged them into a straight line, then into a square, then back into a line, the rocks tapping together with a metallic click.
“We better go find Pudge,” he said, and Ike climbed down from the jetty.
I jumped after him, got right up in his face. “So that’s it?” I yelled. “We’re just gonna take it?”
Ike kicked at the shells and rocks at his feet.
The water lapped against our sneakers.
Dario’s rocks clicked and clicked and clicked.
“Fuck that.” Ike took a stone from Dario’s hand.
At the end of the jetty, Sal and his friends laughed in low voices.
Ike chucked the rock and hit the side of Sal’s neck; if Ike had been sober, he might have beaned Sal and killed him.
Sal grabbed his throat and dropped the bottle — the sound of glass smashing is the last thing I remember before they were on us.
***
Shawna doesn’t look me in the eye as she hands me a plate, and I know my suspicions are right. In the living room a few minutes later, Dario takes Shawna’s hand and tells me what I already know.
I choke down that brownie and swear I’m happy for them.
Shawna doesn’t say much — probably worried I don’t know enough to keep my mouth shut about the way she threw herself at me the night of the funeral — but Dario says plenty.
That the two of them were building something real.
That he’d never felt stronger.
That he’d decided to be Shawna’s plus one at her cousin’s wedding.
I blink. “The wedding that’s the same day as Ike’s Yankee’s game?”
“Yeah, do you mind?”
“Does it matter?”
“That trip’s a bad idea, Frankie, you know?” Dario glances quickly at Shawna. “The truth is when she asked me to go with her, I felt like I’d been sprung from jail.”
“From jail?”
“You know what I mean,” Dario says. “I was relieved.”
They look at each other then — just for a second — but it’s as final as the three thousand miles Pudge put between him and the rest of us.
As final as Ike’s grave.
***
After the glass shattered that day on the jetty, Ike went down fast and stayed there. One of the tall fucks got me in the eye — when I fell to my knees, he stepped onto my back and flattened me against the beach. The shells and rocks tore into my face. He wrung my left arm back further than any arm was ever meant to stretch — after a pop and a fuck-load of pain, it stretched back even more.
Beside me Dario whimpered then screamed, and I was sure we were dead men — all of us — until Pudge returned with flashing lights and EMTs.
Sal and the rest of them broke something in all of us — my arm snapped, Ike’s skull was fractured, Dario’s rib punched through his lung.
In time, we all healed, but we never returned to that jetty.
None of us did.
Not even me.
Not until today, the day I was supposed to be at a Yankee’s game with Dario and Pudge and Ike.
Today, I walk out to the jetty alone.
Shells crunch underfoot as I get close.
My foot slips as I climb the rocks.
The waves crest and crash beneath me.
I pull the tickets out of my pocket and hold them in the breeze.
I know things haven’t been the same since Ike and Dario and Pudge and me left Regents, but I always figured we were like the tide — high, then low, then back to high. I never guessed we might be shells tossed together by an ocean that could just pick us up and scatter us again.
Above me, a plane screams as it begins its descent, and I tear the tickets into a dozen tiny pieces.
I hold them so tight my hand throbs.
My heart races.
I watch the plane bear down, a sixteen wheeler with wings, until it drops out of sight to land safely on a tarmac I can’t see.
Then — breathing deep the stink of the tide — I toss the tickets into the wind and, as the pieces flutter down to the rocks, to the sea, I turn and walk away.
Image: photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
- We Own the Jetty - June 23, 2023