Act of God

sun and age—somewhere in the low sixties, I’d say. His hair was bleached white from gray and black, shag cut in no particular style. His tanned arms were sinewy, strong without being showy, at the ends of the sleeves of a “ Seaside Heights ” T-shirt with a tear at the shoulder and a food stain between the two words in its legend, as though someone had inserted a sloppy hyphen.
    “Help you?”
    “My name’s John Cuddy.”
    “Utt.”
    “I’m sorry?”
    “The name’s Utt, Frank Utt,”
    “Oh.”
    “You figured my name’d be ‘Cholly,’ right?”
    “Crossed my mind.”
    “Bought the place, it was already called Jolly Cholly’s, Seemed a shame to lose the goodwill, given I’d already paid dear for her. Help you with a room?”
    His voice had a singsong quality. I said, “You’re not from around here.”
    “From that Boston accent, neither are you. What difference does it make?”
    Definitely not the jolly innkeeper. “Not much.”
    Utt answered me anyway. “From North Dakota , originally. Fargo , along the Red River . Only one in the country flows south to north. Got tired of seeing the thermometer stuck at forty below in the winters, having to plug the car in at night to keep the engine block from freezing.”
    “You ever heard of Steve Nelson?”
    “Linebacker, wasn’t he?”
    “One of the Patriots’ true and few stars.”
    “Went to North Dakota State, if I remember correctly-Not exactly a football factory, but you got what it takes, you can make it anywheres, I guess.”
    I said, “What made you come out here?”
    “ ‘Back east,’ we’d call it in North Dakota .”
    “Back here, then.”
    “Already told you. The weather.”
    “Yes, but why New Jersey ?”
    “Heard about the beach. Call it ‘going down the shore’ here, though. Figured it might make a nice change of pace, kind of a retirement before I retired.”
    “How’s it working out?”
    Utt rubbed his chin twice with his thumb and forefinger, but more like the chin was a watermelon pit he was shooting out. “There some reason you’re warming me up like this?”
    “There is.” I showed him my ID. “I’m looking for a woman from Boston .”
    Utt nodded.
    “This is a picture of her.”
    He glanced down at it, but just barely. “I knew there was something wrong with her.”
    “She stayed with you?”
    “For a week. You took one look at her, you could tell there was trouble, but I figured she might be good advertising.”
    “Advertising.”
    “You ever seen her in a bikini?”
    “Just this photo.”
    “Doesn’t do her justice. She moved like original sin, twitching her rump this way and that. Near drove her friend crazy to see the other fellows measuring her out.”
    “Her friend?”
    “The long-hair.”
    I looked down at the photo of Proft and Teagle. “Him?”
    “Yeah, him.”
    I worked on that.
    Utt said, “They drove up here in this yellow convertible, said they’d heard I had VCRs in the rooms. Well, I had to do something, didn’t I?”
    I stared at him. “Something?”
    “To draw the folks in. Mister, we’ve had four bad summers here out of five. Hospital tide, just plain rain, then a couple of winter storms like to wash every grain of sand from the beach.”
    I thought of the closed restaurants I’d seen coming in from the parkway.
    Utt said, “Tourism’s down so bad, you have to do something, so I tried VCRs in some of the rooms.”
    “Just some of them?”
    “Well, I figured not everybody’d want one, there are a few who just want to forget about the world. But they usually got the money to help them forget, they head down to Ocean Beach , maybe. Rent a little cottage and not talk to anybody for a week. Your Darbra girl, now she was different.”
    “How so?”
    “She must have introduced herself to everybody on the strip. I had people coming up to me in stores, mentioning she’d been in, telling people how much she liked Jolly Cholly’s. I was right, huh?”
    “Right?”
    “About her being advertising. Even when she wasn’t in the bikini, she did me some good here. If only it weren’t for the noise.”
    “The noise?”
    “One night they was here. The last night, actually. I remember because I kind of expected her to apologize and all, but she didn’t.”
    “Apologize.”
    “Yeah. From the noise they made that one night with the movie they were watching. See, they wanted a room with the VCR, but I had only the one on the first floor. I figured, most people who’d