You Have the Wrong Man (25 page)

  
RIDERS TO THE SEA

B
ell was fighting a sex hangover as he fixed a fried egg sandwich. He was feeling unsettled and wanted to line his stomach before he resumed his evening schedule at the Narragansett. He scored the egg with a spatula; the gold pillow wobbled, then steadied, its lacy albumen white as a doily.

His knees turned hollow and tensed back each time he remembered the CVS girl from the other night. They had parked at the Cliff Walk. He let her out of the passenger side and she came right along, with just her fingertips alert in the palm of his hand. Her jeans had zippers at the ankles and she ripped each tag, one cuff, then the other. The twilight lingered, reflected on the sea. She made him acknowledge
his first view of her, the labia’s pink crest, sudden, symmetrical as a tiny valentine.

He adjusted the toaster. The electric twists glowed. Then a neighbor kid ran past the window, notching left and right and screaming in crimped bleats. Bell snapped the dial on the stove and went outside. Some neighbors had stepped onto their lawns to see whose boy was having the trouble. Bell looked down the string of white clapboard houses which ended on First Beach; nothing had changed much since he was small. He tucked the spatula inside the mailbox and followed the people down to the water. A group had assembled at the edge of the sea; a few men waded in ankle deep. Thirty feet out, a windsurfer tacked back and forth in silent, accurate swipes.

The woman was face down, her chestnut hair filtered forward, then pleated back in the calm water. The waves came in like clear rolls of Saran before puddling on shore. The sea hardly tugged her. A wreath of suds, pearly as BBs, surrounded the body and tagged the rocks. He couldn’t see her face or guess her exact age. She was wearing a cocktail dress stitched with fancy beadwork. Sewn in undulating lines over her hips, the beads reflected the sun in shifting gradations of light, like the contrasting whorls in polished marble. This marble effect made her look like something that had toppled from a pedestal. The woman rode back and forth in six-inch increments over the pebble sheet. Bell saw it was the agitation of the brine, the brine forced through the cores of the miniature beads on the woman’s dress which had created the foamy scud on the surface of the water.

Bell was living at home again with his mother and his sister, Christine, coming back to Newport after three months in a Navy brig at Portsmouth, Virginia. He had hoped to wrangle some duty in his hometown. He asked for the Construction Battalion Unit, where he could do his hitch building piers or grouting the swimming pools on base. Instead, he had been assigned to the Naval Supply Center in Norfolk. He never shipped out. He worked on a terminal in the bowels of a warehouse, cataloguing dry goods and food supplies for the carriers. He couldn’t tell the weather, what clouds scumbled overhead, tinting the sea. All day he was under the fluorescents.

He began to do some pilfering. It wasn’t much, just what he could get into his Plymouth once or twice over weekend liberty. Mostly it was cases of cigarettes, which he sold to Richmond Vending. After his time in the brig, he wasn’t surprised by the general discharge. Its abrupt language was stinging, even without being accusatory. In just two lines of print it was all over.

He tried to adjust to hours in his mother’s house—scents from the kitchen, yeast cakes soaking, knotted rolls swelling like broken knuckles, the floor always gritty with cinnamon sugar. He hated to hear the same low thump of the radiator building with steam, the pipes knocking room to room, and then subsiding. All of his old haunts flipped before his eyes like lantern slides or stereoscopic pictures: the old Viking Look Out Tower, the Mount Hope Bridge with its green lanterns, then the Providence skyline, the State House with its needle spire injecting the horizon. The vision of the drowned woman was a refreshing surge, washing through the ordinary furnishings and clutter in his childhood house.

The crowd on the beach had adjusted to the visual impact. One man questioned the idea of an actual drowning—the woman could have been dumped. Someone said she must be a Boston whore down for the weekend. Bell knew that there were always illicit odd jobs during the off-season, when summer boutiques fell back on drug trafficking. Motel bars hired girls to do some modeling; they arranged elevated runways by just lining up three or four billiard tables. One or two video pioneers manufactured hard-core tapes, working out of the Sheraton, and the same up at the Ramada. Bell’s stomach was still empty, but he wasn’t hungry. He felt weighted, almost sleepy; the abrasive slushing of the waves over the beaded dress was hypnotic. Because the woman had washed ashore so close to his house, he couldn’t resist thinking it might be a commentary on his arrival. He studied her body. Bell saw she had a little mole halfway up her thigh, just at the hem of her short dress. He saw it, then flicked his gaze farther out. It was restful to study the horizon, letting it snag and scurry. Then he looked back at the woman.

An emergency vehicle drove up the beach. The paramedics flipped her over and tried to revive her, by rote theory, before lifting her onto a gurney. The wheels of the gurney left tiny furrows in the sand, but the tide was coming in, erasing wide crescents. Bell was impressed, but he couldn’t figure out what left him astonished. He envied the woman’s anonymity. Her suspended identity enriched his ballooning awareness: the world was full of nobodies.

He thought of a bar trick he liked to perform for the girls. He could do it all night with just a pack of Salems and
a sixty-five-cent Krazy Wand bottle. He takes a calculated drag and exhales smoke into a soap bubble. It drifts into the tables of ladies. It pops. The smoke is released.

When he returned to the house, his mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot, her hand making a figure eight, then tapping, then twisting. The spoon on the enamel rim resonated on the spinal nerves and Bell walked over and took the spoon out of his mother’s hand. She took it back. Divorced from his father for years, she was still upset if she sometimes saw him on the street. She told Bell that she had met his father at one of the rotaries and they had to steer around the circle together for a few moments, jockeying for position. Bell told her to pretend that his father doesn’t exist. She reminded Bell that they lived on an island, after all, and they couldn’t always avoid each other, could they? “Quite a scene on First Beach,” he told her.

“Did we know the girl?” his mother asked him.

“Probably not.”

“You didn’t recognize her?”

“I said no.”

Then he heard his sister, Christine, drive up the oyster shells with her boyfriend, Miller. Christine worked days at Raytheon. She seemed different since his discharge from the Navy. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on. Her face looked both expectant and sullied. As if expectancy itself was what tainted her. Bell didn’t imagine she could have changed too much since high school. She maintained a serious, collegiate aura although she didn’t go on to college. She had a habit of biting her lower lip, organizing her thoughts with her teeth clamped down on the same red
swell. In Bell’s absence, she had joined the local Latin League, going to monthly potlucks with some steeped-in-culture oldsters and scholarly kids interested in the Roman lifestyle. She tried to explain to Bell about the Saturnalia. Then, she was a new member of the Newport Community Theater, where she had been asked to star in a one-act play. She showed Bell the flyers advertising the production: “Kristine Bellamy in
Riders to the Sea
, by Irish playwright J. M. Synge.”

Her name had been spelled incorrectly with a
K.
Bell approved of the change, telling her he never liked the word
Christ
in her name. He saw that she carried a spinning wheel back and forth to the rehearsals. The first night he was home, he watched his sister leave the house with the little wooden contraption, a wheel and a spindle. It gave him a start. Yet she was still wearing her David Bowie tour jacket, scuffed leather, scabby at the elbows, a relic of the seventies. The spinning wheel lost its clout against the rock-’n’-roll souvenir, and the contrast pleased Bell.

“This is Miller.” Christine introduced Bell to her new boyfriend. “I met Miller at the Community Theater.”

“I change the colored spots and move the flats back and forth with the kids who don’t get the parts they want. Idle brats,” Miller called them. Miller came often to the house to prompt Christine and help her rehearse her lines for
Riders to the Sea.
Bell wasn’t pleased to have Miller around when he wanted to settle in with his mother and sister.

Bell told Christine, “I found a drowned girl on the beach.”

“You found her?”

“Actually, I was second in line.” He waited for her reaction. His sister looked at him. She saw he was evaluating
her, so she didn’t say anything. His mother went next door to discuss the news with her neighbor, who had signaled to her through the facing kitchen window.

When it was just the three of them, Miller admitted that he wished he had seen the drowned woman. “Nothing like a body in the surf,” Miller said.

“What do you mean, nothing like it? Are you crazy?” Christine asked.

Bell squinted at Miller, trying to see where this was going and he pushed it along. “Miller’s right about that. It’s a seventh wonder.”

“An impressive sight, isn’t it?” Miller asked. “More lyrical than a body on dry land. Like a message in a bottle. There’s a mysterious connection, a romantic spell, like a tryst between the victim and the person who finds her. Who found the woman?”

“A kid.”

Miller said, “Yeah, well, but you were down there. You had a part.”

“I felt that,” Bell said, “like I’m initiated.”

“Exactly! It’s a tingle,” Miller said.

“She was like some dish from Atlantis,” Bell went on, teasing his sister.

Miller discussed local catastrophes, boats going down, a couple of notable shootings, Sunny von Bülow, and the six or seven yearly leaps from bridges.

“Hey, who writes the Crime Report, is it you?” Christine rolled her script into a tight tube and pointed to Miller who had seated himself at the kitchen table.

Miller talked all that time but never looked directly at Bell. He talked about the drowned woman as if he was teaching a class on it. Miller looked too old for Christine.
He had stiff ashy hair that formed three or four stalactites across his shoulders. He smiled at Christine, showing teeth that were harnessed in clear plastic fencing, some kind of invisible orthodontics to correct an overbite. A progressive decision for a man his age, he told Bell. Miller slouched with his legs extended deep under the kitchen table, a posture, Bell believed, that should be reserved for family members only.

When Miller stretched his arms over his head, Bell glimpsed a peculiar device belted at his waist. It was some kind of hospital gizmo, a tiny box, the size of a pack of Winston Kings. A small display screen shimmered as an emerald dot pulsed to prove the battery pack was A-okay, or to provide some other light-coded information. Bell tried to remember what he knew about modern medical technology. “What is that you’ve got there?”