Reading is Writing #10: Eveningland

A meditation on Cops. Then moments of rejection and desire on the Gulf of Mexico.

Didn’t have any other pictures, so here’s the Worm in a bag.

It is Police Week here in Washington, which means that for six straight days the cops go roaring by on Connecticut Avenue with full sirens blaring.* They give honor guards to every contingent bussed into the city from Dulles or National or BWI or elsewhere, howling all hours of the day, eight to a dozen motorcycles per coach bus.

It is a show of force by an occupying army. The police hate Washington. And more than Washington, they hate Washingtonians.

The metro is too dangerous for the brave Praetorians. City buses are a Communist plot, and parking fees are Terrorism to our virtuous guardians of public order. They pour into restaurants where the tour bus companies get kickbacks for every group above a certain size, and they choke up and turn red with fury (anguish?) at their kitsch memorials.

At night, drunk, they stagger back to their hotels, puking on the sidewalks and sweating with fear. And in sleep, a fevered chariot rides across one cop’s neck and then dreams he of crushing wifely throats, of ambuscadoes, Israeli drones, of cells two meters broad; and then Aldean drums in the ear, at which he starts and wakes, and being thus aroused does a bump or two and sleeps no more.

In the mornings, bewildered, fidgeting, they return to the convention halls, doing Ocular Patdowns on every twink who passes by, and discuss how best to extort more money from municipalities.

This is what Fascism looks like in its everyday clothing: a North Carolina police contingent idling their bikes in the hot sun at a red light, staring down a lone black pedestrian trying to cross Florida Avenue with an almost violent hatred.

Shortly after, a Waymo goes by, promising the destruction of the city’s underclass of gig workers—deportation or automation, it does not matter, the People must be liquidated to save the Republic. No more shall the wraithlike DoorDasher ply his trade on a semi-legal e-bike.

In more peaceful weeks, I hear the helicopters pass low over the White House, see the searchlights glazing over the borderland neighborhoods between white Washington and normal Washington, and I see the armed parties going out on overtime and hazard pay to crack student protester skulls. When one of the Gendarmes dies—of a heart attack, of an aspirated hot dog, of a car crash—the honor guards come out again for the Thin Blue Line, to pin medals on chests and collect double overtime for funeral duty.

But when a delivery bike courier is run over by a corporate lawyer in a 9,600 pound SUV there are no parades, no public memorials, no camera shots of weeping widows with lifelong pensions. Of the scores of professions more dangerous than Cop, not one has the corporate solidarity to seize power in the nation’s largest city, to harass its capital for a week on end, to demand with histrionic sobs that it be made a protected class.

What does it say about the men who claim to guard a society that they behave as if they are at war with it?

Now, let’s talk about not getting laid.

Eveningland

The first story in Michael Knight’s Eveningland, “Oil and Water,” has a strange party scene. Given my tendency to write party scenes, I thought I’d write about this one narrowly focused scene, which is the fulcrum of the story.

“Oil and Water” is narrated by an old man who lives in a marina off Mobile Bay and concerns a seventeen year old boy, Henry Bragg, whose father owns said marina. Henry falls for a girl who works there, Dana Pint, who is below him in class status. Dana has to work for a wage, Henry can volunteer with the EPA to keep tabs on oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill as it encroaches on Mobile Bay.

Dana goes out with Pat, an older boy with a car, whom Henry dislikes. Henry manages to charm Dana over some weeks (using knock-knock jokes) and she agrees to go out with him on his boat. Henry believes that he and Dana will go out alone.

But when the day comes, Dana has brought Pat, another girl and that girl’s boyfriend. We get this moment:

“‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said.

“‘You’re not late.” Dana Pint met his eyes, looked away. ‘Pat just now pulled up.’” (19)

I think readers are meant to take this exchange, particularly the moment where Dana looks away, as her indicating to Henry that she didn’t want Pat there either. Yet he is.

Henry has thought to himself that Dana needs some sort of rescue from her relationship, but Knight’s narrator is ambivalent about this and generally avoids saying much about Dana’s feelings, which are unknowable to him. Instead, we’re left with these small, embedded moments in the text. There’s another as Dana’s companions, Pat, Doug and Kim, board the boat. Kim, Dana’s roommate thanks Henry for permitting their presence: “How tiny he must have felt inside his bulk. For a few seconds, Dana Pint kept her eyes on her feet, curled and uncurled her toes.” (20) Then she takes her t-shirt off and gives the word for them to sail. Here, again, the failure of eye contact is written as if Dana is admitting something.

Dana’s boorish friends discuss whether alka-seltzer kills birds, and the boy pilots them into Mobile Bay, and we get this aside about the Civil War: “Mobile didn’t fall until Admiral Farragut got so tired of waiting he abandoned good sense—Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” (22). It’s the second reference to Farragut’s passage in the story and the narrator is telling us that Henry has been rash and will be again, that his present, taciturn quiescence won’t stand. He’ll get tired of being circumspect and try confronting Dana and/or Pat. The narrator is also telling us that Henry will succeed in seducing Dana only by a bold stroke.

Henry and Dana get a quiet moment together while Pat and Doug are playing and Kim is in the water. Dana, in an attempt to reach out to Henry, starts a knock-knock joke, but he demures and she snaps at him. When he fails to respond to this, she becomes defensive, and at last Henry speaks in answer to the joke, prompting Dana to chide him again. We come to the fulcrum itself:

Dana Pint sighed, stood, brushed sand from the backs of her thighs.

‘“There’s something wrong with you.”

“‘There’s something wrong with you who?’

He watched her stalk off down the beach, snapping her bikini bottom into place, watched her lead Pat into the dunes and out of sight. He wanted to leave them stranded on the beach. He should have left them. I would have left them. But he was not that kind of boy. Across the bay, paper mills and chemical plants exhaled fingers of blue smoke, beautiful from that distance, like machines for making clouds. (23).

What follows from there is complicated and deserves summary treatment before I return to the last few lines of this not-party party: Oil breaches the defenses laid by the EPA, Henry throws out his model airplanes, the symbol of his boyhood, and takes a job at the marina after his father lays Dana off (unaware of his son’s desire for her) because the oil has ruined the boating business. Dana comes to collect her last check, Henry convinces her to go for a boat ride. In the swamp, they have sex, which she initiates.

But before all that, we have this boat ride/party on Mobile Bay, which runs for about 4 pages out of a 37 page story. In it, Dana twice seems to admit that she doesn't want Pat to be there, then she takes Pat off to (presumably) have sex in the sand dunes. Is this to make Henry jealous? Maybe. Is it because Pat is sadistic and controlling towards her? Possibly. Is it because she’s ambivalent about her relationships? Likely. But Henry’s desires also play a role here, or at least the narrator’s interpretation of them does (“None of this is true. All of this is true.” are the first two sentences of the story, hahaha). And the narrator thinks Henry is savoring pain by becoming attached to a woman who can only partially reciprocate his desires.

Henry seems to have a series of realizations during these passages, though we are not privy to them. I think, based on what I’ve quote above and what happens next, that we can reconstruct them like so: First he feels Dana has deceived him. Then he feels that she has not, at least in a meaningful way. He wonders why Pat knows about this outing, wishes to ask her, but he cannot. He realizes she doesn’t want to hurt him when she starts the knock-knock joke, but that, in a real way, she does when she takes Pat off into the dunes. His illusions about girls who want to be saved, but don’t want to be saved are broken by the complexity of the encounter. Dana could theoretically have avoided telling Pat where she was going—we see later that she is constrained by honesty, but not fidelity—but that would be impractical, as the reader knows that Pat drives her around. She would have to invent a reason for coming to the marina on a day off. Pat, Knight seems to imply, is both dumber and cannier than Henry, and would surely intuit Henry’s intent and Dana’s tacit desire, perhaps he already has and this is what Dana is trying to communicate with the broken gazes.

As is the case with many coming-of-age stories about a man’s attraction to a woman, I find Dana to be the more interesting character. She’s a junior college dropout living with a roommate, she eventually sleeps with her boss’ son, she seems painfully aware of the hard strictures of her social world and chafes against them. She’s funny and mean. By contrast, Henry is a too-honorable, too-innocent boy, who comes to a painful awareness of his desire’s force and inadequacy in the moment of its denial. But innocence and honor can verge easily into naïveté and intransigence, and there’s something a little comic and dull about a man who patrols in a gas powered boat against the oil, who wants a girl but can’t articulate it directly, who drinks black coffee and eats Raisin Bran without milk.

I’m reminded of the subtlety of another Gulf of Mexico beach day complicated by incompletely reciprocated attraction: Jack Burden’s afternoon with Anne and Adam Stanton midway through All the King’s Men. Both passages are painfully rendered moments of awareness—sexual awareness for Jack Burden, moral or emotional awareness for Henry Bragg. But their narrative style is widely divergent, Robert Penn Warren’s Burden has a tendency to reach for the lyrical analysis, while Knight’s anonymous old man gives us a single, small moment of commentary: “I would have left them,” and lets the reported facts of the story stand, with this reservation serving to build and dissipate the tension.

Many of the stories I’ve read this semester have this sort of restraint, it’s a feature of the form going back to the days of high modernism at the latest, and I’m a sucker for it—I got up and paced around the room in the middle of this story. But I wonder, too, what it would look like if Knight gave us a little more.

Note: If you’ve read this far please consider upgrading your subscription from free to paid (monthly). I have to pay Bennington tuition this week and am feeling the pinch.

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*They actively try to hit you with their motorcycles, it’s so goddamn annoying. I have the walk sign! Get a real job!