The Interloper (12 page)

Never forget, Raven, that I had you in hysterics, in and out of disciplinary hold, over my fancy Clancy. Never forget the anticipation in the pit of your gut when you heard the mail call. How many nights did you fall asleep thinking about your sweet Miss Hazelton? How many chambers of your honeycombed heart did she illuminate with her sweet light? And her photographs, smudged with grime and rubbed away at the edges—how many nights did you spend with them, with that sweet 4 × 6 world, that other dimension, populated by anonymous figures and the long-gone shade of a true innocent? Raven, when you pulled that trigger, was there a real human being in front of you? Or had someone wandered onto your game board? The pawn you took was someone’s child and brother. Maybe you knew that. Maybe you didn’t care. But your game board, it turns out, lies atop someone else’s, and you don’t know the rules.

Out of the blue, Patty suggested we go “on a date,” like we used to do.

“I need to get out of the house,” she said. “Besides, it’s starting to affect you, working so hard.”

“I’m getting stuff done,” I replied, even though I was getting nothing done at all. The stack of pages in my desk now consisted of letters to and from Raven, various notes taken on the subject of love, and modified photographs. Those documents were nothing but the contrails of a process, the receipts from a surprise party, nothing in and of themselves but the side-effect of my plan. Not to be shared with anyone, except Patty, and only then when I could provide proof that her brother’s murder had been properly avenged.

She suggested the pier, to which neither of us had been in over a decade. She had recently read an article in one of her lifestyle magazines about revisiting the wonders of childhood places. Whereas a more poetic-minded individual might flip
through photo albums or ask her mother to corroborate fuzzy memories, Patty embraced her scientific literal-mindedness and decided we should revisit the pier in person. The amusement park from Patty’s childhood had been destroyed in a storm, but a new version had recently been erected.

“Sure,” I said, “why not?”

“You could try to sound at least a little excited.”

“No, no. I am excited. I was just finishing up a few things in here.”

She went to the bedroom to get dressed, while I put away some of the Lily stuff I was working on. When she reappeared, she was not wearing black anymore. She wasn’t dressed up for a fancy night out or anything; she had put on a light orange sweater and some khaki pants.

“You’re not wearing black,” I said.

“I was getting tired of it,” she said.

“Tired?”

“I opened the closet, and there was a huge row of black clothes. I saw some color, hiding in the corner, and I decided to put it on. Before my closet went black all the way across.”

“Jesus, Patty. This is a big deal.”

“Let’s just go on a date, okay?”

“To the pier.”

“To the pier.”

We got in the car and drove toward the ocean.

“Remember,” she said, “the Beach Rider and the Bump-a-Dump? Those were my favorites.”

I had only been to the pier in its post-destroyed, pre-rebuilt stage, under very different circumstances. “I remember Eileen
buying weed from a cholo on a big tricycle. It was laced with PCP. We were high for eight hours.”

“You know what I loved? Those giant clouds of cotton candy.”

“I remember a cloud of flies. Couldn’t figure out if the guy was dead or asleep.”

“You could watch the sunset from the Ferris wheel.”

“Pieces of that wrecked Ferris wheel used to stick out of the water and skewer surfers.”

“I remember. CJ used to surf there. My mom was worried sick about him.”

All roads lead to CJ. We were quiet for a while. We drove under the neon arch at the entrance, down the steep ramp toward the parking lot. I paid seven dollars for the privilege of parking on the pier itself.

Our car rolled bumpily over the wooden surface of the disappointed bridge. That’s from some other book, something I read in college. I got the joke, thought it clever at the time, but somehow looking at this pier, at the blue glow of the Ferris wheel against the red sky, I got the sense that the pier was quite satisfied with its carny feel, with its rides, its garish curlicues, its lack of utility—boats no longer pulled up to it—and that the bridge, that workaday structure, bearing nothing but traffic all day, might even find itself jealous of the pier, despite the latter’s not reaching an “other side.” A pier is a liberated bridge.

We walked hand in hand to the main section of the pier, through crowds of people bunched in groups of two or four, or clumped around vendors, such as the white-bearded man who could write your name on a grain of rice, the red-bereted caricaturist,
the dumpy frizz-haired woman hawking watercolors of the sea, and so on. The sense in the air was not urgency (where could we go anyway?), nor was it total relaxation—the pier was too crowded for a leisurely stroll. More like a pleasant sea of potential threats—after all, this was where the poor kids could congregate for free, and gangs were always a presence.

Among the potential threats, Patty’s cavalier attitude toward trading her mourning black for khaki and orange. She looked like the Patty of old, the pre-murder Patty. The transformation had been as simple as pulling clothes from a different part of her closet. Yet the transformation was not complete. Patty was the same woman she had been yesterday, as likely as ever to get tangled up in memories of CJ. Did she believe she had changed, or was her sartorial switcheroo an attempt to change herself from the outside in? Either way, this impulsive behavior was not the way she typically did things. I worried she might try to jump into the ocean.

Patty stopped short.

Someone almost bumped into her and said, “Hey—watch it.”

“Why’d you stop?” I asked Patty.

She crouched down and placed her palms on the wood. “Feel this.”

I did the same. “What?”

“Wait.”

I waited. Nothing. Then a rumble, a bump, and a shiver. People walked past us now without taking note—we’d become an instant fixture. Rumble again, bump, shiver.

“The waves are breaking right here,” she said. “That’s the ‘bump.’ They’re standing up and hitting the pilings directly below
us. We’re on the spot. It moves around, depending on the tides.” She was thinking aloud. “And people are walking by like it’s nothing. There should be a marker—one that moves—to tell you where this spot is.”

“They’d have to pay someone to move it back and forth.”

“No, but isn’t this—” Rumble, bump, shiver. “Isn’t this beautiful?”

I stood. “Why don’t we go to the railing, where we can actually watch it happen?”

“In a minute.”

I walked to the railing. She remained there, crouched down, palms flat on the ground, the flow of pedestrians opening and closing around her. In an orange sweater and khakis. Her eyes were focused on nothing, moving back and forth, like she was reading Braille. I turned toward the water to watch the waves hit the pilings. A seagull sidestepped on the rail and took flight. The waves checked the pilings, then passed right through them, again and again. Marching across the sea to arrive there, stand up, fall on their swords, and vanish eternally. A pair of arms wrapped themselves around my waist.

She kissed my neck. “You know what amazes me about all this? The waves never stop. They keep going without a break, sloshing around, like forever. These waves were pounding the shore before man ever walked the earth. That’s astounding.”

The seagull returned to the railing and pointed one beady eye at us.

“You could say the same for a lot of stuff,” I said. “Volcanoes, for example.”

Patty unwrapped her arms from my waist and sidled up next to me on the railing. She focused her gaze on the beach. “You contradict me a lot, you know that?”

“No I don’t.”

“Seriously. I’m trying to be positive here. I’m trying to steer things toward the good stuff. For both of us. And you persist in undermining me.”

“Do you want to go on the Ferris wheel?” This was an olive branch. I hated the Ferris wheel, she loved it.

“Are you even aware of what you’re doing, Owen?”

“I’m suggesting we ride the Ferris wheel.”

“I was trying to talk to you.”

“Do you want to ride the Ferris wheel or not?”

“Of course I do. I’m trying to say, though, that I’ve noticed a change in you. I wanted to get you out of the house. Spend some time together. Actually talk.” She sighed. “I know things have been difficult. But I feel like you’re not as curious about me as you used to be.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. I stopped and thought for a moment. “I’ll always be curious about you, Patty. You’re complex.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should. I’ve just been more internal recently. It’s an occupational hazard.” She leaned into me. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I will make it all up to you.”

I felt horrible. I’d put out the fire, but reassurance was a dangerous game, emotionally. I wasn’t sure if I believed everything I had said. Except of course when I said I’d make it up to her. What else had I been doing? I needed to get back on track.
All those pictures of Eileen had temporarily interfered with my otherwise stable feelings for Patty. While I was scanning images, going through old memories, I could feel my heart drifting off course. But I knew it was temporary. Hearts drifted and found their way back to port all the time. When the Ferris wheel put us at the top and stopped, Patty insisted on standing to better enjoy the view. I asked her to please sit down. She sat and took my hands in hers. The basket swiveled in the breeze. Once everyone had gotten on, the rickety contraption began its rotation in earnest. My hands never left Patty’s. Round and round we went, each rotation punctuated by the reappearance of the red-faced operator on his platform, his sinister smile directed at passing riders. When they let us off, I ran to the pier’s railing—out of sight, behind the rides—and threw up.

“I must have eaten something funny,” I said. “My stomach was feeling bad beforehand.”

She rubbed the small of my back. “You poor thing. Why didn’t you say so?”

“Didn’t know I was going to throw up.”

I felt the relief of one who has thrown up. We hunted around the concessions for someone who would sell us water. I swished it around in my mouth and spat it out over the railing.

“You want to walk to the end? Breeze might help refresh you.”

“Sure,” I said.

We joined the flow of couples meandering to the end of the pier, where there were no amusements or concessions, only a city-owned building, closed to the public, and a smattering of subsistence fishermen packing up the day’s catches. The sun had
gone down just before we rode the Ferris wheel, so the sky had gone from reddish to indigo, and the moon had spread its silver carpet on the rippled ocean surface. A moonglade looks so much like a path across the water, and it always points at you—how can you help but feel elevated by it? We took a moment at the end of the pier to stare into each other’s eyes.

“Do I have puke breath?” I asked.

“Nope.”

She kissed me. We kissed. We were not the only couple standing at the end of the pier kissing, but it seemed like we were. She had been right to insist on a date night. I could already feel the big wooden captain’s wheel turning as my heart found its proper bearing again.

On the walk out to the end, I had absent-mindedly scanned the people sitting on benches or leaning against the railing, in sort of a baseline threat-assessment of all loiterers. One couldn’t be too careful on the pier, especially with someone as blissfully oblivious as Patty (her child’s image of the place overlaying the more complicated and treacherous reality). However, I had failed to notice a particular somebody encamped next to one of the benches, panhandling.

It was the Cartoon GI. I tried to guide Patty to the other side of the pier as we headed back, but she stayed her course, thinking I was playing a walking game with her. I tried to keep my head down, hoping he would not notice us, praying he wouldn’t recognize me. Patty, unfortunately, recognized him first.

I handed him a five-dollar bill, concealing it so Patty couldn’t see how much I’d given him. He stared at me coldly
when he took the money. We walked away, Patty leading. I looked back for an instant, to make sure he wasn’t going to talk to us or follow us, and I saw him hunched over his bag, rifling through its contents. He was pulling things out now, at a furious pace, making a pile out of his belongings next to his bag. It was difficult to see what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe he was going to put the fiver deep into his bag? The last thing I saw him pull out was a small balled-up piece of purplish cloth. The lavender panties. I was certain of it. My mouth went dry. I turned away, noticed that the Ferris wheel lights had cast everything in a pale blue. It could have been anything. My mind was playing tricks on me. I kept my hand at Patty’s waist, kept her moving forward.

“That was generous of you,” she said.

“What? We’ve got something. He’s got nothing.”

“You never give those guys money.”

“A little here, a little there.”

“You gave him five bucks.”

“Five bucks?”

She nodded.

“I only meant to give him a dollar. Should I go back?”

“Honestly, Owen. Just try to pay more attention.”

“Five fucking dollars.”

“Let’s go play some games.”

“Sure, okay,” I grumbled.

“How about the ring toss?”

“I’m not in the mood.”

Supposedly frustrated by my supposed error, I suggested Whac-a-Mole. Conciliatory Patty, no fan of the game, conceded.

Five holes, a big scoreboard, a mirrored backdrop with a spinning yellow light on top, and a rubber mallet on a rope. I put my money in and hit play. The moles, brown plastic things with white buckteeth, popped out of their holes and I whacked them back in with the mallet, again and again. Patty played on the machine next to mine. Her score was consistently lower. She giggled as she hammered. I did not giggle. I stared at the five holes with cobra-like intensity. We played until Patty grew tired of it, and then I played two more games alone.