Act of God

introduce himself to the white player behind one table. The kid was about the same age as Nate Imes’s boy, but tall and straight and skinny as a beanpole, his jeans riding about three inches above his shoes from the last year’s growth spurt.
    The player took a baseball card from him. “Seven-fifty.” The kid looked at him. “Say what?”
    “It’s seven-fifty for the autograph.”
    The kid fished in his jeans for what looked to be the change from a ten he’d used for the admissions charge. “Ain’t got but seven.”
    The player shook his head, but said, “Okay. Discount, since you’re here so early.”
    Taking the money, the player dashed off his signature. “See, this way the autographed card is worth more to you, because there’ll be fewer of them. Most everybody else on ‘he team’d hit you for ten, at least.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    Handing the card to the kid, the player said, “So it’s really helping you, charging for this.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    The player frowned. “You’re welcome.”
    “Ain’t no need to thank you, dickhead. I bought this, you didn’t give me nothing.”
    Agreeing with the kid, I made my way to the door.

    Moving south, I worked a guesthouse, two motels, and three more guesthouses. Zip. Then I turned back north and caught a break at a small motel on the beach.
    Taking off her glasses, the woman with the orange hair and pudgy fingers held the photo up to her face, nearly touching her nose with it. “Yeah, I seen her.” She handed back the photo.
    “Do you remember when?”
    A finger scratched the side of her head. “Week ago? No, must have been two. I remember because I was thinking about giving her the room Mr. and Mrs. Pejorek had, but we didn’t get that far.”
    “Why not?”
    “This girl, she wanted a VCR in the room. I said to her, ‘Honey, you come down the shore to get away from all that, right?’ ”
    “Then what?”
    A shrug. “She made this big thing of how she needed a VCR and was there any motel along the beach that had one.”
    “And?”
    “And I told her to try up at Jolly Cholly’s.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Few blocks north. Got a sign like a clown’s face on it.”
    I thanked her and left. It was boiling hot in the midday sun, and I’d left the Prelude unlocked with the windows down. As I got to it, a heavyset man in his early thirties was lugging a big Coleman’s cooler across the parking lot. He was sweating like a pig, the cords on his neck straining above an already-sunbumed back. A woman about the same age was sitting on a blanket she’d spread over the sugarlike sand, using a shoe to anchor one of the corners.
    He called out to her. “Stay where you are, Mitzi. I oughta be able to finish this in seven, eight trips.”
    Over her shoulder, without even looking at the guy. “Don’t get on me, Tony.”
    He reached the blanket. “Get on you? The fuck you think this is, your birthday or something?”
    “You get nasty again, I’m taking off.”
    Tony set down the cooler. “Mitzi, you take off again, I swear I’ll drag you by the fucking hair into the fucking water and drown you.”
    “Fuck you.”
    Tony turned to go back to wherever he’d come from. “I’m tilling you, Mitz’, fucking drown you is what I’ll do.”
    I got into my car, wondering if Greg and Tony shared a common gene somewhere deep in the pool.

    The wooden sign was faded, and one of the screws holding it up was about to go, but it did sport the face of a crudely drawn circus clown and JOLLY CHOLLY’S underneath. There was a bar next to the motel on one side and a pizzeria on the other. All in all, Jolly Cholly’s didn’t look like the sort of place you’d choose for getting away from it all.
    The motel itself was built on a concrete pier perpendicular to the beach, a row of units at street level and another on the second floor with a white balustrade of rusting metal. I walked up to the door that had a smaller clown’s-head sign and the word OFFICE underneath it.
    The exaggerated hee-haw of a donkey sounded as I walked through the door. In front of me was a hinged counter with an angled stand holding brochures for restaurants, miniature golf operations for the kiddies, and party boats for fishing. A coffee machine too small for guest use was perking on a table behind the counter. The man who came through the door next to the machine might have been Cholly, but the other half didn’t fit.
    He was dour and long of face, and his skin was leathery from the