Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (11 page)

Leonard snapped the remainder of his cigarette toward the line of go-carts. “People can't stop asking me about that accident,” he said. “But I'm tired of talking about it.”

“I wouldn't bother you if it weren't important,” Rachel said.

“Yeah? You said you were there, right?”

“I was.”

“So what do you need me for? What can I tell you that you don't already know?”

“I want to know why,” Rachel said.

“Then you need a priest or a philosopher or a psychic with a crystal ball, but not Leonard Washington Washington,” he said, standing up and straightening out his shirt. “I think you got a picture of that boy in your head you want to get out. Well, let me tell you something. It don't come out. Talking about it won't make it go away. There aren't enough words. So don't bother.”

“I can't make it go away,” Rachel said. “I don't even try. That boy?”

“Yeah?”

“He was my brother.”

“Jesus,” Leonard said softly, the old man peering out of his eyes.

“Hey, Leonard!” The fat kid from the ticket booth was yelling again, this time leaning out the window. “We got people waiting.” At the station, three enthusiastic boys pulled away from their mother, pointing to the track and making claims on the carts they wanted: the red one, the one with golden stars, the green one with yellow stripes.

“I got to go,” Leonard said. “Funny thing. I live in AC. But every summer, my mom sends me to Sea Town to stay with my aunt. You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because it's safe. How funny is that?”

 

 

July 14, 2013

When I came in to open the mini golf, Tango pulled me aside. He said Mike was gone.

I said I wasn't surprised. Considering. After the thing at the beach, you'd have to think his days at the Moon Walk were numbered. Frankly, I wondered about my own.

“No,” he said, pulling his dreads back behind his neck and fixing them with a wide elastic thing striped like a coral snake. “I don't just mean from here. I mean gone. Disappeared. I mean Wild West, left town kind of gone.”

So what? When Mike didn't show up for work yesterday, most of us just chalked it up to a hangover. Rumor had it he may have been fired, but the fairy tale princess wasn't saying—in fact, she was quieter and paler than ever, practically translucent. Out of pity, we were just going about our business, no hassles, no conflict. When business was slow and the princess was alone in the ticket office, she was as still as the astronaut on the Moon Walk sign over her head. They made quite a couple, two beings whose spirits had abandoned this world for another far away, leaving their hollow bodies behind.

Tango kept going. Mike hadn't shown up for work. Mike hadn't answered his phone. Late yesterday evening, Tango dropped by his apartment. No answer. After ringing the bell and pounding the door a few times, Tango swung around the back alley to tap at his window. Enough light came in from the hallway to show that the room was empty: no bed, no belongings. Just a small pile of trash in the corner—pizza boxes, soda cans, a few rags—otherwise, the room was completely stripped bare.

“Real spooky,” Tango said. He picked up a club and gave it a few one-armed swings. “I've heard about this kind of thing before but thought it was just bullshit, you know, people just talking.”

Against my better judgment, I took the bait. I asked him, “What kind of thing?”

Tango looked over his shoulder to the ticket box. The princess hadn't moved an inch. He lowered his voice. “People who cross Stone have a way of … leaving,” he said. “For good.”

I told him he was right—it did sound like bullshit. Sea Town's a dry town in the shadow of Atlantic City, and here in our family-friendly little cocoon, there's a kind of admiration, almost envy, of the bigger city's glamorous, wide-open vices. They have casinos, cocktail waitresses, and Mafia dons; we have clam shacks, beach patrols, and Stone—and we like to imagine that he's more than he is. Sure, Stone can be tough. But he is hardly a tough guy. My dad's worked with Stone for nearly thirty years. If there was anything weird going on, I'd know about it. I told Tango as much.

“If anything was going on, what would your father do—write you a memo?” Tango said he hadn't believed it either, but facts were facts.

Seriously, I said, what did he think? That Stone had him whacked?

“You don't have to kill someone to get rid of them,” Tango said. “Let's just say Mike was probably highly encouraged to move on.”

Mike was getting ready to leave, I said. He was bitter, and he hated it here, and he made his move. Not, I thought to myself, before taking one last parting shot at the princess. With my help. “He wanted to move on,” I said. “And he did.”

Tango shook his head, insisting on the weight of the evidence. What about the phone? What about his friends? Would he leave without saying a word?

“Maybe he wasn't such a good friend,” I said.

“Maybe,” Tango said, walking away. “Maybe.”

Later, the princess finally left the ticket office. In fact, she damn near scared me to death. I was locking up for the night, squaring the clubs and balls away in the bunker behind the restrooms, when she came right up behind me. I must have jumped three feet in the air.

She said she had to ask me something.

After what I did to her at the beach party, I expected a demand for an apology. Then she hit me with another surprise.

“I need to find an assistant manager.”

“Why?” I said, trying to make light of it. “Did you lose one?”

She let that one pass. She said it would mean better pay and more hours. “I know you're saving for school, so…”

That was true, but how'd she know? Dad talk to Stone, Stone talk to her? It irritated me. Then I took a deep breath and dismissed the conspiracy. Who isn't saving for school? Even so, I brushed her off, saying I wasn't interested.

Diana upped the ante: she'd handle all the paperwork; I would take care of the attractions, the facility stuff. Maintenance.

“Like my dad?”

“Sure,” she said. She bit her lip. “I really need the help.”

I asked her about Amy, Tango—why not one of them?

She raised an eyebrow. It was the most animation I had seen in her since the party. “Would you promote them?” she asked.

I thought for a few moments. If Mike's apartment was really empty—and I didn't think Tango had any reason to lie about that—then he was really gone. And truth is, I could use the money. Living away from home won't be cheap.

“All right,” I said. “Sure.”

The princess smiled. “I'm glad,” she said.

 

chapter eight

make-believe ballroom time

Rachel woke up to stirrings in the kitchen: cabinets opening and closing, the clicking of igniting gas jets on the stove. Betty had been out late the night before, so Rachel hadn't expected her to get up first, and she was right. In the kitchen, a man in a tangerine bathrobe
—
Betty's
—
stood barefoot at the counter, a tablespoon in one hand.

“Just looking for the cereal,” he said. “I didn't wake you, did I?”

Rachel said he hadn't. He was lean, rangy, with gray streaks in his dirty-blond hair. He had a trucker's tan: copper-red forearms that didn't match his paler bare legs.

“Bowls are over the sink. Cereal's over there, on the counter,” Rachel said.

“Thanks.”

“Milk's in the fridge.”

“I might have figured,” he said. “Rachel, right? I'm Dan.” He shifted his spoon to his left hand and extended his right. Rachel shook it. There was a spider tattoo, a black widow, on his forearm. He caught her looking at it. “Got it before I knew better,” he said. Grinning, he added, “I should've got a tarantula.”

“Nice robe,” Rachel said, taking a seat at the table.

“Yeah. Well.” The kettle whistled on the stove, and Dan busied himself preparing a mug of instant coffee. “You want some?” he asked.

“I'll pass,” she said. “I have to warn you, that jar of coffee's been here awhile.” Two boyfriends ago, Rachel knew but didn't say.

“I take what I can get,” said Dan. He brought a bowl and a box of shredded wheat, which he winced at, to the table. “But the milk's fresh?”

“See for yourself.”

They didn't say anything else while he took his first few spoonfuls of cereal. Dan drew the folds of Betty's bathrobe around him, closing a gap at his chest that had opened when he sat down. He seemed embarrassed, and Rachel liked that. Once last winter, when Rachel had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, she was startled in the hallway by a man with nothing on but a towel around his waist. He wasn't at all embarrassed, and Rachel didn't like the way his eyes followed her as she slid past him sideways to reach the bathroom. Back in her bedroom, she had locked her door, then pushed her dresser against it, just in case. Fortunately, she never saw him again. And she never brought him up with Betty.

“You're what, nineteen?” Dan asked.

“Eighteen.”

He repeated it softly as if testing its solidity. “Eighteen.” He said he'd give anything to be her age again. He'd give his right arm. He held the arm with the spider tattoo out over the table
—
evidence before the court. “In a heartbeat,” he said. “I'd give this to be your age again.”

“I don't think it's a good deal,” Rachel said.

“You don't know,” Dan said. “Just wait. Wait and see.”

*   *   *

Although she had other plans before her shift
—
she had wanted to find something she could take to Leonard Washington Washington, an excuse for going back to SeaSwift
—
Betty insisted Rachel swing by Mrs. K's to drop something off, a picture of Curtis inside a frame crusted with little seashells. Betty made no apologies or excuses for Dan, but Rachel hadn't expected any. She understood.

She didn't care to dwell on it, but there had been a boy last year, Nicky, a senior with AP classes he affected contempt for. In the six weeks they had seen each other or dated or were boyfriend-girlfriend or hooked up
—
no words for it really fit
—
Nicky imposed his dreams upon her. As in real dreams, the destination constantly shifted, like a horizon seen through a kaleidoscope. He was going to write a novel. He was going to start a band. He was going to be an environmental activist. He was going to hitchhike across the country. He was going to meditate in Tibet. He was going to paint in Brooklyn.

In the end, as college admissions rolled around in the spring, Nicky was going to Buffalo
—
a legacy admission of his father's.

“I like the cold,” he had said to her when he got his admissions package.

“Good thing,” she said. She had no admissions packages because she had made no applications.

That was the last time she had really talked to him. He always wanted to talk about where he was going, and Rachel had nothing to bring to the conversation. At first she felt awkward, then bored, then annoyed. But the whole thing made her feel very adult.

They had sex
—
a first for both of them. And she wasn't drunk, stoned, or in love, any of the usual excuses. After six weeks of hanging out and exchanging text messages
—
neither confident in what it was they were supposed to do or not do, say or not say, feel or not feel
—
they had raced to the finish line just to get there and be done with it. There was nothing particularly triumphant in the crossing.

When it was over, she patted his back as if comforting a baby, a gesture she had used so often with Curtis that it had come to her automatically. He had nodded, as if to say,
Okay, okay
, though what or who was okay wasn't clear. It was just okay.

And when he didn't call or text her the next day or the day after that, she felt relief. No high drama. None of the wailing she had seen other girls indulge in, producing a theater of tears and hugs just to assure themselves that something of consequence, anything, had really happened.

Rachel knew better. In the end, it was as matter-of-fact as a handshake. And when she passed Nicky in school halls, on the street, or on the boardwalk, there were few hard or awkward feelings.

That, Rachel felt, had been a reasonable kind of love.

“How thoughtful of you,” Mrs. K said when she accepted the picture. “Thank you.”

“Thank Betty,” Rachel said. As she saw it, Mrs. K already had more than enough pictures of Curtis as it was. “Not sure where you'll fit it.”

“I'll make room,” Mrs. K said, holding the picture aloft with both hands. “Shells. Nice touch.”

“That was Betty too.”

Mrs. K nodded her head. “I'll consider it a collective effort. Speaking of which, how are things going with your fresh starts, your new beginnings?”

“We're still firming up plans,” Rachel said.

“I see.” Mrs. K might just as well have said, “Bullshit”
—
the meaning was the same. And she would've been right.

*   *   *

At SeaSwift Go-Carts, Rachel sat on a curb opposite the station, her backpack between her knees, waiting for closing time. Two banks of stadium lights cast a sour glow on the track. Moving crablike beside the go-carts
—
one hand on the wheel, one on the door frame
—
Leonard and two coworkers steered them into a corrugated shed behind the station.