Cementing the Deal

            The night before their wedding, Becky sent Gregg an envelope through his best man, Tommy, at a smallish stag party that Becky certainly wasn’t worried about. Gregg was already out of sorts—not due to shots of tequila but because of a buddy’s gift: an hourglass that counted down his last grains of freedom. The sand was white as cocaine, lining itself hellward like an upside-down geyser. Gregg hated it, yet tried to smile through the gibes: yes, time’s running out; no, don’ order a lap dance; yeah, pour another an’ spare me the worm…

            The envelope opened to a print-out of the honeymoon destination: the Maldives, from the bride’s family with joy. “Y’see? There’s love by th’ shitloads,” slurred Tommy, flipping the hourglass clumsily for more time to drink.

            Gregg said he needed to pee, and walked out of the night club they had sheepishly reserved. Maldives, he thought, how malicious. He conjured some images on his iPhone, suspecting the worst of this glorified shoal. Sand as the only foundation—not even duned, but flattened in league with a devouring sea. Becky’s vengeance upon me!

           

            With night air, he could reason: Gregg deserved every granule of this marriage test. Becky was literally ‘the girl next door’ ages 5 through 13, when Gregg moved away and she stayed. He’d done everything wrong: jumping the fence when least welcome, teasing her younger brother to tears, kicking their sandcastle down after hours in the making… Well, Becky wasn’t dumb. She thought up a plot to rig rat traps in the tunnels and turrets of a new, more elaborate sandcastle—she must have found them around their century-old house or stolen them from the hardware store. At any rate, she set them—perhaps with the help of her younger brother—and when 10-year-old Gregg hopped the fence for an unhappy ambush, he yelped at the snap of a trap in a tunnel that pointed to ‘treshur’ (spelled just like that) and another that clasped to his now-swelling toe. Becky had buried a minefield of traps, setting them with no need for cheese—the sandbox itself was Gregg’s lure.

            He retaliated weeks later, by moonlight. His family owned four cats, and all their soiled kitty litter was piled in back by the compost. He shoveled half of it from his side of the fence to hers, then hopped over to sprinkle the mix into the sandbox. The cats approved of this initiative and added fresh contributions, easily tearing through the tarp cover that Becky’s bemused father installed.

            Then she retaliated through this very sand as an ingredient in a  PB&J (& catshit S) sandwich. Getting into Gregg’s lunchbox was a bit tricky: she knew his patterns on the bus ride to school and hoped he wouldn’t notice a sly switcheroo for the sandwich his mother had wrapped. He didn’t, and obliviously stuffed his gut before she whispered in his ear. He reached for his throat—not hers—and violently barfed the cafeteria to wild abandon.

            Tommy, hourglass in hand, found him slouched against the railing of the bridge they sometimes took together. “What up, 3G, why the sour puss?”

            Gregg shrugged him off, lost in his memory of high school heroics gone awry. He had committed to a quasi-Green Peace venture to northern Alberta and the scourge of the oil sands. The plan, driven by some college dropouts, was to wander through the tailings ponds and set fire to what they could—including the water itself. No one trained him to discern the difference between terra firma and quicksand, however, and in a matter of hours he was chest-deep in muck that would enwomb him, but for the perturbed response of petroleum engineers. Gregg’s fire was to ward off ducks from landing in the sludge, without which he might never have been rescued.

            “Yo, you good, bro?”
            The first time he got drunk with Tommy was in college during their spring break trip to South Padre island. He’d rather stay with his new girlfriend (Becky, go-figure!), who surprised him one day with a knock on his dorm door and a water-under-the-bridge kind of smile. They went out for soup and sandwiches—no tricks this time—and fell more or less in love. She had reservations about his impetuosity, such as testing the waters of South Padre. He had already booked the room and paid the breakage deposit, and Tommy needed a wingman, and…

            Gregg went berserk when one of the beach games was to see who could drink the most while being buried up to theirs necks. Tommy had to rugby-maul him away from the scene. “They’ll drown themselves!” Gregg hollered to the stoic sky, back then and now on his bachelor-night bridge.

            Tommy, needing no further cue, recalled his response and assured him again: “their friends bailed them out. Tha’s what friends do.”

            Two cops strolled toward them to intervene if this were a jumper. Tommy waved them off with deliberate enunciation, “wedding tomorrow—ever’thing to live for!”

            They waited for Gregg to glint with his eyes some agreement. He did so by taking the hourglass from Tommy’s loose grip, holding it up for all to regard, and heaving it into the river. One officer grimaced and the other one laughed, the law needing no real enforcing. They left with a tip of their hats, ‘good luck’.

            3G and his best man watched for a while the river play tag with various beams of light. Tommy suddenly seemed to realize, “if you died tonight, I’d have to marry her.”

            Gregg softened his face. “Won’t let that happen.”

            Tommy shifted his weight and fished out the crumpled envelope, which Gregg pocketed. “You gonna go to Maldives, then?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Y’sure?”

            “I need to fix the sandcastles I’ve wrecked.”

            “Tha’ sounds too rek—regre’ful.”

            “Both she ’n me… only ever wanted to be in that sandbox together.”

            “What if she gets cold feet?”

            “Maldives are warm, I think.”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2019)