Cape Disappointment (3 page)

“You've got the wrong guy, Thomas. I'm not my brother.”

“I'm not my brother, either,” I said, throwing him into the melon counter. The woman shopping for melons had finally backed off when the chip rack came down, else she would have been knocked over. He landed on the counter and slid to the floor along with about fifty melons, riding them like an avalanche. As he fell I spotted a gun in a shoulder holster. It should have slowed my attack but didn't. It should have alerted me to his true identity, but it didn't.

A left hook caught him on the cheek and he went sailing backward. He got up quickly and inexplicably began unbuckling his pants. Dropping his belt, he put up both hands in a defensive posture. I knocked them away with my left forearm and punched him in the chest. His right eye was beginning to swell from one of my earlier blows. Before I could reach him again, a stocky man in a green apron came around the corner, made eye contact with me, and said, “Get out of my store right now!”

“Happy to,” I said, striding forward and knocking my victim into the dairy counter. Because his trousers had fallen to his knees, he looked like he was sitting on a toilet in the margarine containers.

“No, I mean it,” said the man in the apron. “I want you out of here. Now!”

“I'm not Bert. I'm Snake,” insisted my quarry.

“Sure you are,” I said.

The grocery store worker stepped between us. I had to give him points for chutzpah, because at that moment, I must have looked like I was on PCP. Situated as it was in the University District, the store had seen plenty of druggies and probably had its share of pilfering and shoplifting problems as well, so this store manager was used to trouble, but I was bigger than him and mad as a hornet. He was a few inches shorter than my six one and out of shape, though he had the look and stance of a former high school or college wrestler.

“Don't get mixed up in this,” I said. “You don't have a clue what this is about.”

He must have seen the dementia in my eyes, because he stepped aside, but not before he'd stalled long enough for my victim to climb out of the dairy cooler, turn his back to us, drop his trousers to his ankles, and bend over. “Oh, my Lord,” said a woman who'd only that moment pushed her grocery cart around the corner.

“See that scar!” he shouted from between his knees. “That's from a bull named Bart Simpson. Ended up killing a rider a year later. Bert doesn't have any scars on his ass, and you know it. This is me, Snake. God damn it, I'm Snake.”

We stood like that for some time, Snake with his rump in the air, the grocery store manager, the woman with the grocery cart who seemed reluctant to leave the first mooning she'd probably attended in years,
and a host of additional gawkers on either side of us. It began to dawn on me that I'd just given Snake a beating meant for his twin brother.

“Geez, I'm sorry, Elmer.”

“Snake. Don't call me Elmer,” he said, hoisting his trousers and boxer shorts as one package. “I showed you my damn teeth.”

“You threw those cans at me,” I said, touching my brow and finding blood on my index finger.

“You should have seen the look in your eye.”

“You're dressed like him. Where's your cowboy hat? Geez, you guys really are identical.”

“We're not identical. He's got more teeth than I have.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Well, now you do. And next time, take a look at my ass before you begin whipping it.”

We must have looked a sight, me with blood running down my face and Snake with his right eye beginning to swell shut, his clothing disheveled, hair mussed, a knot growing on the back of his head. The grocery store manager was staring at Snake's shoulder holster, which was probably the reason he'd stepped back. It was one thing to get between two students roughhousing in the store, quite another to get between two grown men, one of whom appeared to be insane and the other packing a .44 Magnum. If Snake hadn't looked so disreputable, the grocery store manager might have mistaken him for a cop. He might have mistaken me for a cop, too, but I had six or seven days' growth of beard and wore rumpled jeans and a sweatshirt with food stains all over it, and my hair hadn't been washed in days.

“Listen,” Snake said, draping an unwelcome arm around the grocer's shoulder. “My friend here's been having a bad week. Maybe you could cut us some slack if the cops show up.” Snake pulled his wallet open and handed the man five one-hundred-dollar bills along with his business card. “You take this and spend whatever it takes to fix all this. If no cops hassle us, I won't show up for my change. How's that sound?”

“Well …”

“I thought so.” Before we left the store a boy of about six or seven walked up to Snake and handed him his dentures.

“Better sterilize your hands, kid,” I said.

Snake took the teeth and pushed me gently. “Come, Thomas. Let's get out of here before the cavalry arrives.”

Once we were outside and sitting in Kathy's car, Snake said, “Were you going to kill me?”

“I hadn't thought that far in advance. Why are you dressed like your brother?”

“I thought maybe I could pick up some leads if people thought I was him.”

“You picked up a fat lip.”

“Thomas, that sort of thing is going to get you in serious trouble. I've never seen you that mad.”

“I've never
been
that mad. You going to be all right?”

“Maybe.”

THE WAY I REMEMBER IT,
the afternoon light at Cape Disappointment was serene, almost ethereal. A man nearby talked on his cellphone while his wife waited impatiently beside him. I picked up my own phone and made a call, the two of us, strangers, standing side-by-side talking to people who were dozens or hundreds or maybe thousands of miles distant. It occurred to me that the cellphone was the pièce de ré-sistance of public isolationism, enabling us to remove ourselves from the people around us in an instant, which was one reason it had been embraced wholeheartedly by the entire planet.

As I pushed buttons on the phone, I visually traced the flight of a small plane flying north over the Pacific Ocean along the Washington coast under a low cloud cover. In a few hours the sunset would be brilliant. Already shafts of sunlight were angling from the heavens in spires that hit the ocean. She answered on the first ring, as if she'd been expecting the call, or as if she didn't want anybody else to hear the phone ringing. “Hi, baby,” I said.

“Hey, big boy.”

“
You got people around?”

“Well, sort of.”

“Can you talk?”

“I can talk.”

I could hear a man chattering in the background, then she replied
to him but covered the phone so I couldn't hear. Also in the background were the sounds of traveling, the engines on the jet or whatever. As we spoke, I handed a small digital camera to one of the tourists standing in front of the lighthouse, gesturing for him to snap a picture of me with the ocean in the background. After he'd taken my camera, I moved around so that the plane was framed in the photo over my shoulder: the lighthouse, the plane, the ocean. It was going to make a great joke photo, our vacation together, Kathy in the plane, me a mile away chitchatting with her on the phone.

It was midafternoon and the sky was a curious amalgam of the soft grays and blues that only the Northwest can produce, and then only in autumn. I was standing on the grass under the little black and white lighthouse at Cape Disappointment and gazing out at the Pacific Ocean, which was a deadly shade of slate today, the water riffled by a light wind. The ocean was close enough to taste, and I could feel its vastness in a manner that made me long for another kind of life. Seattle, where I lived, was buffered on two sides by water, some salt, some fresh, the Puget Sound and Lake Washington, but this lighthouse overlooked the largest body of water on earth, and that put things into perspective.

It was chilly and I had my jacket zipped to my chin while the man with my camera tried to figure out the mechanism. I explained that all he had to do was push the button, but he needed to understand the workings of his tools—one of those guys.

“One day wasn't very long,” she said. “Although we got in about a week's worth of you-know-what.”

“A week? By my calculations, that was two days' worth. But we'll catch up at home.”

She laughed and it charmed me the way her laugh had charmed me from the beginning. “You're incorrigible.”

“I'm a guy. My job is to be incorrigible. It's in the DNA. At least where that's concerned. Kathy. I see you. You're … maybe a mile out.”

“There's something I need to tell you, Thomas—”

The tourist was still having trouble figuring out my camera, so I stepped forward and with one hand, pointed out the button he needed to push. Out over the ocean, the plane waggled its wings. She'd promised she would have the pilot do that, and it tickled me that she had not forgotten. “Kathy? What were you going to say? Kathy? You there?”

I'M LEANING AGAINST
the windowsill, peering out at the city skyline as it appears between several nearby tall buildings. I am a thoroughly confused man in a hospital gown wondering how long I've been here and whether or not my wife is alive. Even though I've seen and spoken with Kathy, I am convinced somewhere in the reptilian portion of my brain that it was all fantasy.

I've never had so much curiosity as I have right now. I'm wondering what I was thinking the other day when I beat the hell out of my friend Elmer “Snake” Slezak, whom I mistook for his twin brother, Bert. I'd never liked Bert, but what had he done to send me over the edge? My actions had been about two miles past the last bus stop of sanity. If Kathy is around, why doesn't she visit? My bare legs are trembling. I'm close to falling. I don't remember getting out of bed and tottering over to this windowsill, but here I am.

Outside, the wind spatters tiny raindrops against the window. I hear a familiar male voice in the hallway. He's flirting with a nurse. He's been in the room, I think, because Elmer Slezak has an unmistakable scent about him, of cologne, cigarettes, and the vague smell of leather, having been a former rodeo bull rider. There is also the odor of farts. “Snake?”

“Yeah, man.” Elmer hustles in from the corridor, where he's waylaid the African American nurse. “Jesus, you're not supposed to be out of bed!”

Elmer and the nurse walk me back to the bed, one on either arm. Snake wears cowboy boots, tight jeans that make his legs look like ax handles, and one of his huge, silver world championship belt buckles. “What on earth possessed you to do that?” asks the nurse. “You fall down in here and break your skull, it's going to be my fault. I don't want you out of bed again. You understand?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Jesus, Thomas,” Snake says. “You can hardly walk.”

“Gee, you think, Elmer?” I may not have all my wits about me, but I can still shovel out sarcasm.

“Don't call me that.” Years ago Elmer had seen some old movie,
Escape from New York,
and afterward decided to call himself Snake. Sometimes he forgets about it for weeks or months, but most of the time he insists on the nickname. When I want to get his goat, I refer to him as Elmer.

The nurse arranges the blankets over me and I lie back, exhausted. It's uncanny how a couple of days in bed can zap your strength. When the dizziness has abated, I focus on my friend. “What happened?”

“You can't remember?” Snake asks.

“Just bits and pieces.”

“You want it all?”

“Everything you know.”

“That's going to take a good little while, and I doubt I know it all. You were keeping your own counsel there toward the end.”

“I've got nothing but time.”

“Yeah, okay, but don't fall asleep on me. You've got a serious head injury, or don't you remember that?”

“I know it but I keep forgetting,” I joke.

He sits in a chair beside the bed and starts to lay out the story of my last ten days as he knows it. A couple of sentences into it, I want to tell him to stop, because it is clear right off the bat that I don't have the capacity to grasp a tale this knotty. Half the names he mentions are people I either don't recognize, can't place, or swear I've never heard of. He speaks for five minutes, and as he speaks I forget nearly all of what he's said. Instead of asking him to start over, or warning him that he's wasting his breath, I let him continue. There is something reassuring and at the same time frightening about his voice. Snake is a competent
private investigator and a good friend who would do almost anything for me. I don't have many others who are so close.