Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (6 page)

Naturally, the ramp jams all the time—in an obscene position suggesting a passionate desire for the ninth hole. Inside the lander, there's a cogged rotor that lifts and drops the ramp. On really hot days, the casing swells just enough to bind the cog drive. Then I have to go in and free it up. The long-term solution is a better-machined housing. But we don't get long-term solutions. We get me, on my hands and knees, dicking around with a greasy cog.

With my head up the lander's behind, I don't think Mike or Stone saw me. Mike said something about fairness, about a deal being a deal. He had put in three summers at the Moon Walk, and by tradition, if not by rights, he was in line to be manager. It was never a formal thing, just something commonly understood: you pay your dues, you get ahead. That's the way it's always worked. Mostly.

“Things change,” Stone said to him. “Leadership means flexibility.…”

I squatted on my haunches, the rotor in my hand, wondering what would happen next. I could see the two of them square off through a portal in the lander—I'm sure Buzz Aldrin had a much better view. Mike squared his shoulders as manfully as he could while Stone let his belly speak for him—an occupier of considerable space that could not be easily moved. Would Mike storm out? Would Stone throw him out?

In the end, Stone made the first move out the door, leaving Mike to mumble something about “what goes around, comes around.”

Later, in the bathroom, while I was digging grease out from under my fingernails, Mike cornered me by the sinks and vented his frustration, bitching about his “three fucking years.” He appealed to the unspoken rules of boardwalk seniority that applied, he insisted, even to the boss's kids. He spat into a sink. “Where the hell has she been for the last three years?”

I rolled my head toward the open window and told him to lower his voice. The ticket office was just a few yards away. Stone's daughter stood in the middle of it, in frame and design a completely different animal from her father: a grasslands fawn to his backwoods bear, with damp brown eyes and long blond hair like curtains around her head. She kept her hands fixed at her side, as if afraid anything she touched would break in her hands. We Waterses have been working for the Stones for years, live in the same town, go to the same schools, but I can't say I know her from Adam. Or Eve.

Mike played it tough, saying he didn't give a shit if she could hear. But his voice was softer. He splashed water on his face, wiping it off with our brown, rough-and-ready paper towels. He said it wasn't fair; he deserved better.

I was right—I heard a cough, a polite clearing of the throat, a few yards away. I was sure she could hear everything.

Don't we all, I told him. Join the club.

He made an ugly laugh. “That's easy for you to say. You're on the inside.”

The inside? I didn't like where he was going. Was he talking to me or sending a message to her? “The inside of what?” I asked him.

Mike lifted his hands in the air as if balancing the world on his palms. “All of this,” he said. “The whole Sea Town thing.”

What, because of my dad? Because I'm a Waters? “Funny thing,” I said, toweling off my hands, “I'm right here. Same as you.”

“It's not the same,” Mike said, leaving the bathroom. “Not even close.”

 

chapter five

green ribbon of freedom

A dark blue uniform has a way of standing out in an amusement park, a stab of midnight in the thoughtless sparkles of fun. It was late in Rachel's day shift, and there was no line at the booth; when she saw her approach, Rachel's first thought was for her pockets. Anything incriminating in there? Any nail polish that might squeal, any perfumes that could rat? But the red cones where the pirate had been spirited away restored her good sense. This was probably about the
Don't fall
graffiti. She rehearsed a description of the vandal in her head, his short stature, his mirrored aviator glasses. Justice, she thought with satisfaction, was about to arrive.

The officer was of medium height, fit, with a slab of blond hair bound behind her and the permanent squint of someone who spent her life in the sun; without the uniform, she could have been a surf princess or one of the day-boat operators who ruled the bay piers as if they were old family estates. “Rachel Leary?” she asked.

“Yes,” Rachel said, surprised to be addressed by name. But the police had probably been poking around, asking who might have seen something. You would expect that.

But she did not expect a request to accompany the officer to the station.

Involuntarily, Rachel looked up, for advice from people who were not there. “The station?”

“We have a few questions.”

“Don't I need some kind of permission or a lawyer or something like that?”

A thin smile. “It's not like you're under arrest or anything,” the officer said. “Your shift ends at five thirty, right?”

Without meaning to, Rachel put her hands on her pockets, patting the reassuring nothing that was in there.

*   *   *

The police station was a sullen, eggshell-colored box as broad and flat as an open hand. Police cars and ambulances hived in its sunbaked lot; a couple of officers, furtive as schoolboys, smoked cigarettes around the corner from the front door. Rachel's officer acknowledged them with a nod. Inside, she exchanged a few words with a colleague at the reception desk, a thick-faced man who, after registering Rachel's presence with a lizard's slow glance, showed no further interest in her. Beyond him, a handful of desks, loaded with outdated computers, were manned by officers in short-sleeved blue uniforms.

“Come with me,” Rachel's cop said, leading her between the desks to a glass door striped with blinds at the back of the office. It opened into a small, dim room with one long table and two people, a man and a woman in civilian clothes, who clipped their conversation short when Rachel entered and dismissed Rachel's officer
—
she had come to think of her as her own
—
with a curt thank-you.

“Miss,” the woman said, waving her to a chair, “we hope you can help us by answering a few questions.” The badge on her blouse simply said,
CLEMMONS
. Her mule-brown hair was cut military short, and she had a small mole above her lip that, on a prettier woman, might have been attractive. Betty, Rachel thought, would know what to do with this woman. Rachel almost felt sorry for her. “Detective Ryan and I just need a little more information before we can officially close our case,” Clemmons said.

Detective Ryan nodded in sympathy with his colleague's statement, his hands clasped together over a yellow legal pad. He had a scrubby black mustache and heavy jowls that gave his face a look of perpetual falling, as if life and gravity had collaborated to drag his face down. His eyes, wet and red, seemed irritated by allergies or exhaustion; they rested on Rachel without energy or focus. A ballpoint pen, tucked between his intertwined fingers, aimed at Rachel's heart. “This shouldn't have to take long,” he said with some exasperation, hinting that it was out of his hands. No, if it were up to him, this unpleasant business would be over fast. But it wasn't up to him, he wanted her to know. When he lifted his elbow from the manila folder under his arm, Rachel could read the neatly printed label:
LEARY, CURTIS.

“This is isn't about the graffiti?” Rachel asked.

“You can clarify a few things,” Ryan said, splaying the file open. “I hope you can help us. That you'll speak freely.”

Detective Clemmons smiled wanly at Rachel, as if to say,
Yes, you can. You have what it takes. Help us, won't you?
Rachel couldn't find it within herself to smile back. Wasn't Curtis's case already closed? What was left to say that hadn't been said before? She felt a cool breeze on the back of her neck. A faded green ribbon, filthy with dust, fluttered from the grill of an air vent.
Why do they tie ribbons to vents?
Rachel wondered.
Do people really feel cooler when they can see the air is blowing?
“This is about the accident?” she asked, the question catching in her throat.

“We're just straightening out some details,” Ryan said.

“Like I explained in the hospital,” Rachel said, “I didn't actually see … what happened.” In her first interview, just hours after the accident, Rachel had spat out fragments of answers between sobs, between spasms in her chest, her muscles heaving as if abandoning her bones. Out of mercy, officers sat sandwiched at her sides to steady her. In the hospital, Rachel remembered, the air was meat-locker cold.

Rachel gazed down at the table, lingering on its scars: penned scribblings, small starbursts of scratches. Her hands had formed fists on their own.
How dare they?
Rachel thought.
Without my permission.
She made her fingers relax.

“We know,” Clemmons said. “That's all right.”

“Why am I here, then?” Rachel asked. “Have you found something new?”

Nothing changed in Ryan's hangdog expression. “You were watching Curtis that day,” the man said, flipping through papers in the file. “Did you do that a lot?” he asked.

“Do what?”

“Watch your brother. Was that something you had done before?”

“All the time.”

The detectives exchanged glances, sharing an understanding concealed from Rachel. Clemmons picked up the questioning. “Was there anything unusual that day?” she asked.

“Well, yeah,” Rachel said. “It's not every day your brother dies on a roller coaster.”

More shared glances. “Before that,” Ryan said calmly, crossing his arms over the file. “Anything out of the ordinary?” When Rachel didn't reply immediately, he generously offered her a minute or two to think about it. “We'd rather have a complete answer than a quick one.”

Facing these detectives was like walking on the jetties at night, Rachel thought. One misstep, one slip on the bladderwort that covered every dark rock, and you could wedge your foot between the stones. The tide could roll in over ankle, knee, and higher, but try as you might, there was no climbing out. Whether or not such a thing had ever really happened, its possibility was part of the local lore everyone knew yet no one really respected. The threat didn't keep drunken teenagers from wandering out on the rocks, but it did give them fear or bravado or both. Now Rachel just felt anxious.

She went over the day in her head: Betty getting ready for work, Rachel struggling to get Curtis out the door. Her stomach hurt, and she was irritable; she had thrown up twice the night before and suspected there would be more to come. She needed a break, but Curtis was Curtis. For him, pulling on his shorts was a game; putting on a shirt was a game. The more frustrated Rachel became, the more satisfying the play
—
for Curtis. Ordinarily, experience provided wisdom, inspiring patience. But whether it was the hour, her stomach, or the usual conflict with Betty
—
who always needed something, a mirror, her tube of apricot scrub, an opinion on which of two blouses would best match her pants and flatter her eyes, all this while Rachel was neck-deep in Curtis care
—
wisdom and patience had kept their distance.

She'd been rough with Curtis. Rachel hadn't remembered that part of the day before, lost as it was in the accident that clouded everything preceding it. She had been rough buckling his belt into place. She had been rough bending his arms into shirtsleeves. Rough getting him out the door, rough towing him toward the boardwalk.

When they got there, Curtis wanted to go shelling, saying, “C'mon, c'mon,” as if they'd all be gone if he didn't hurry, eager to gather his fill before anyone else beat him to it. There was never any competition, but he couldn't imagine a world that didn't love what he loved as greedily as he did. He would race around the beach, gathering shells into the fold of his shirt before anyone had a chance to deny him his treasure. “No playing on the rocks,” Rachel had told him. “Stay near the high-tide line.”

“The tide line?”

She pointed it out to him
—
a ragged trail of seaweed and beach litter that marked the farthest reach of the water. He nodded his head as if he were listening
—
which wasn't likely
—
and darted down the stairs and through the gap between the dunes. By standing over the rail, she could see him poking about, bending and scooping, holding his finds up to his eyes, stuffing things into his jacket pockets that met his approval, indignantly discarding the things that did not.

Rachel's attention wandered. She was digging her nails into her palms to distract herself from the queasy feeling inside when she felt a sharp tug on her pants. “I found a new one,” Curtis, suddenly at her side, said gleefully. He reached inside his pockets, his tongue in the corner of his mouth, and pulled out a mud-colored shard about as thick and wide as a potato skin, but with sharp white points, like tiny peaks of meringue, along two of its edges. It looked like the breastplate to a miniature suit of armor.

“You found a crab shell,” Rachel said. She didn't care to touch it
—
trash, a carcass carrying a whiff of its innards. Nausea rallied inside her.

“Uh-huh, a shell.”

Rachel took a deep breath, preparing for battle. “It's not a real shell. Well, it's a shell, but a different kind of shell.”

“But it's a shell,” Curtis insisted.

“It's an animal's shell,” she said. “The kind of shells we collect, they come from shellfish, like clams and mussels.”