Wave (16 page)

There was no phone in the basement, which meant he had to climb the stairs to answer the one in the living room. This was something of a challenge due to his achy knees, so, more often than not, he simply wouldn’t bother.

That’s what happened the first time Karen called. Bud figured it was probably a solicitor. Those sonsofbitches were terrorists in their own right, shattering the fragile privacy of a person’s home. In spite of the FTC’s efforts to keep them under control through the National Do-Not-Call List, certain groups—mostly charities and political candidates—still hammered away. Once they learned you had a little spare cash in your pocket, they were unable to control themselves.

So he heard Karen’s first call—the one she’d made from the Tarrance-Smith office—and ignored it. When it kept ringing, he called up the steps, the bare bulb burning above him, to see if Nancy was there. When he received no answer, he put a foot on the first step, and the knee flared as if in admonishment for his foolishness. He groaned a little, let out a deep, why-do-I-have-to-be-getting-so-old kind of sigh, and stepped back. The knee immediately felt better, and he made a mental note to—
maybe
—buy a cheapo phone and put it down here somewhere. He knew where the main line was, and splicing it would be no problem. Yeah, if he was going to spend more time down here, maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea.

As the ringing continued he had grown so frustrated that he turned on the transistor radio over his workbench to drown out the sound. It’d been purchased at the PX in Fort Monmouth in 1977 and still worked like a charm. He rarely touched the tuning dial—it was usually set on whatever station broadcast the Phillies games. He twisted the knob until he found a muzak station. Music never really interested him one way or the other, but anything was better than the continual distraction of the damn phone.

The problem with the coffee table he’d found was that all four legs were wobbly due to severe wood rot where they were connected to the table surface. This was an easy fix—he simply removed the old, rusted screws, moved each leg to healthier wood, drilled fresh holes, and inserted shiny new screws. The end result was even more satisfying than he’d hoped—when he set the table on the floor and gave it a shake, it didn’t even budge. And since the repair work had been done on the underside, it wouldn’t be visible.
Good as new.

With a groan and some more protest from both knees, he stood the table up on end and walked it into his future reading room. He placed it in front of a horrendously ugly plaid couch he’d bought at a yard sale down the street. The neighbor not only gave it to him for a bargain—ten bucks—he even carried it into the basement for him. (Bud was under the impression he was just happy to be rid of it, and from the look of it he understood why.)

There were three boxes of magazines in a dusty corner. Bud dragged one across the cement floor and set it next to the couch. Then, exhausted, he sat down, put his feet up, and took out the first issue. It featured a special NASCAR section and an article on how to build an eleven-foot rowboat.

Back in the workroom, the Muzak station, which broadcast from a tiny office in Philadelphia, interrupted its service to transmit an emergency message.

Bud Erickson didn’t hear it.

Nancy and the boys were in the backyard, working in the small level patch of yard she’d cultivated for her garden. It had been a noisy morning. In her many years living on LBI she’d gotten used to the intermittent blare of sirens, but she thought they were worse than usual today. At one point she thought she heard the phone ring, but decided not to bother with it. She was having too much fun with Patrick and Michael.

Bud was inside. He could answer it.

When
they were married, BethAnn and Kenny had two vehicles—her Toyota Celica and his Dodge Dakota.

The latter was Kenny’s pride and joy. He was a truck man right down to the dust on his boots and the grease under his fingernails. His father had been a truck man, too, and his father before him. The Dakota was the first brand-spankin’-new vehicle anyone in his family had ever owned. He and BethAnn had lied in several places on the loan application and cut back on beer and pot for months to make the down payment, but it’d been well worth it. The obvious jealousy of their friends more than made up for the sacrifice.

Kenny took the truck when he left. BethAnn argued about it, but her soon-to-be-ex-husband didn’t bother arguing back. He knew she didn’t really want it, knew she was bitching purely for the sake of bitching. (Of course he knew—this tiresome habit was one of the reasons he was heading out in the first place.) She didn’t really want it because it was a stick, and she had no clue how to drive a stick. He tried to show her a few times but ran out of patience after the clutch screamed for mercy and the gears sounded like they were being tortured to death.

So she ended up with the Celica—a little putt-around junk heap he’d bought for a hundred bucks from a customer at the shop and fixed up in his spare time. It was primarily for her, but he sometimes used it on weekends because it turned out to be a zippy little thing that used virtually no gas. It required occasional attention due to its age and mileage, but since he was a mechanic it was hardly a burden.

In the years since Kenny had left, BethAnn had made no effort to keep up the maintenance. She followed an entirely different logic—drive it as little as possible and it won’t need fixing. Her luck held for a while, but not forever. A few months earlier, in November, the car began coughing out puffs of sooty black smoke, and sometimes it would stall for no apparent reason while idling at red lights. The battery terminals were encrusted with dried-acid tumors, a sure sign the battery was on its way out. Since she didn’t have the money to buy a new one, she occasionally scraped the crud with a toilet-bowl brush and hoped for the best.

She dumped the videotapes and the photographs into the trunk; the bags of junk food stayed up front with her. Wiggling her bulk behind the steering wheel was, as always, an effort. The part of her brain that was able to think sensibly once again suggested the idea of moving the seat back farther. The rest of her mind pounded the idea down—anyone who saw that would know she was grossly overweight, and she enjoyed laboring under the delusion that no one would notice otherwise. Also, the farther back the seat was set, the more effort was required to hold onto the steering wheel. As long as the seat was nice and close she could keep her arms in her lap and steer with a minimum of hand and wrist movement.

When she turned the key, nothing happened.

Nothing.

“What the—”

Tears filled the rims of her eyes. It wasn’t so much the fear of not being able to escape in time, she was sure that if worse came to worst she’d be able to hitch a ride from someone (she’d heard on WNJN that this was one of the rules Harper had set—if you had room in your vehicle, you had to offer others a ride). It was the thought of having to ask for help in the first place, of having to rely on someone else, of losing control of the situation, that she didn’t like.

Then she remembered: After the last time she’d used the car she had removed the positive battery cable to postpone the battery’s imminent death by minimizing the drain on it. Kenny had taught her this trick ages ago.

She jumped out, unlocked the hood, and brought it up. She froze when she saw just how bad the acid leak had become—the stubby lead post wasn’t even visible anymore. Acid had fluffed up around it like some psychedelic mushroom, all but consuming it within its speckly, greenish-white mass. It occurred to her at that moment that she’d been in the trailer, watching television, for four straight days.

She grabbed the toilet-bowl brush from under the driver’s seat and hurried back. In spite of some vigorous scraping, the dried hunks of acid hung on tight. Something more severe would be required.

She flipped the brush around and tried whacking the tumors away with the plastic handle. Each strike was accented with an angry grunt, and each grunt was roughly one semitone higher than the last.

When this, too, proved futile, she dropped the brush and ran back into the house. A fine layer of sweat began to form on her brow. The drapes over the kitchen sink were looping and swirling gaily in the breeze, as if in celebration that she had left forever. Now, to complete the irony, they came to rest when she reappeared.

One of the drawers contained a handful of tools, but she couldn’t remember which. As luck would have it, she had to yank all of them open before she found the right one (next to the stove). The tools were cheap; the kind you find at checkout lines, are meant to be used only a few times, and would never be found in the toolbox of any self-respecting professional. They were all in perfect condition, as Kenny had bought them for her but she never touched them. The hammer still had the Kmart price tag on the unstained wooden handle. She dug around until she found the flathead screwdriver, then raced back out.

The screwdriver produced the desired result—the acid broke away in dusty hunks. Once the bulk of it was gone, she used the bowl brush to take care of the finer work. Fresh acid seeped out from around the base of the terminal, but she didn’t care about that. With any luck she might be able to wrangle a new car out of the insurance people, too. This could be a very profitable day indeed.

The cable hung nearby like a rearing cobra. When BethAnn touched the rounded clamp to the terminal, it threw a spark, causing her to jump. At least there was some charge left, she thought; hopefully enough. She placed the clamp over the post and raced back to the driver’s seat.

There was life this time, but not much—the engine turned but didn’t start. She looked at the dials and gauges in front of her, hoping beyond hope that she would somehow, suddenly and divinely, be given the knowledge to, one, identify which reading measured electrical power, and, two, evaluate that measurement. She gave that up after about five seconds and tried the key again…and again…and again….

Then she stopped, knowing enough to realize she was pushing the battery closer to the end of its life with every attempt. Out of options and drained of patience, she lowered her head against the steering wheel and began crying. It was a high, squealing sound, broken by breathing hitches and so quiet it was almost imperceptible.

When she looked back up, her eyes were red and puffy, and they stared contemptuously at the battery through the narrow strip of visibility that ran underneath the open hood.

You piece of shit. You piece of no-good sh—

Then the answer came in a flash—the cable wasn’t attached tightly enough to make the required connection.

She scrambled out and went inside again. This time she took a pair of vise grips from the drawer. Back in the driveway she removed the cable from the positive terminal, reapplied it, then tightened the nut until she couldn’t tighten it anymore.

She was so excited—sure that it would work this time—that she literally flung herself behind the wheel. The car creaked and bounced like an old ship. She twisted the key, and when the engine roared into life she screamed, “Yeah! Take
that!
” and clapped like a delighted child.

She got out one last time to drop the hood. Then, returning to the driver’s seat, she rolled all the windows down, trained her eyes on the rearview mirror, and set the transmission into reverse.

Brian Donahue knew he was in a no-win situation. He examined and re-examined all the possibilities and couldn’t seem to arrive at any other conclusion.

If we find Mark, get on the road, and make it out alive, I’ll be charged with endangerment….

He was sure of this, absolutely and unequivocally sure—Jennifer’s mom would see to it. She was that type. Even if her daughter escaped unharmed, the scare alone would motivate her to get a lawyer and have him ripped apart; there wouldn’t be enough meat left on his bones to fill a maggot’s belly.

If I turn the car around right now…

…that might quell the storm brewing inside Mrs. King, but not her daughter. The seeds of hatred would be planted, and if Mark didn’t make it…what then? Would
his
mom be after him, too? From what Jennifer had said in the past, the woman didn’t seem to care much for her son; it sometimes seemed as though she regretted having a son at all. But would this still be her position if he were killed? Mothers have a way of protecting their children above all else. At the very least, the woman would have an easy lawsuit on her hands, so maybe the money would be her driving force—
Yes, your honor, Mr. Donahue had the chance to save young Mark’s life, and yet he drove off in callous disregard.
…