Dead Reckoning and Other Stories

by Dino Parenti

  Next to the letter, a small moleskin ledger. I run the doeskin leather of my gloves across the surface, testing the disparate hides, wondering if they’ll have anything to say to one another. All I feel is the soft plaid cotton of the glove-tops rubbing against my knuckles. At least I won’t leave fingerprints.

  In it, names and addresses, many of which match the faces of the men I saw boarding the Petrichor.

  I grab the ledger, but leave the letter. After mulling it over, I take the gun as well. I think of myself as strong, but the cancers might be stronger, and I’d like the backup.

  2004

  After visiting the small pond a half-dozen times over two days, I resolved, despite its primordial beauty and puzzling hold, to drain it.

  I had to see if Leah was there. To prove no monsters lurked within.

  The well-meaning told me my mom was taken by sea-monsters while scuba diving for oysters. It explained, so they reasoned, why she couldn’t be found. Yet even as a boy of nine, I suspected what would eventually cure rock-solid as a man: that grownups hid behind the irrational as much as children. That shrouding hard truths under soft salvations was a natural human default to shock, and my father, with his lopsided grins and perpetually swollen knuckles, was one of its chief practitioners.

  The actual draining proved simple enough in terms of privacy. Most locals were scared of it, and fewer still knew how to find it. More importantly, the property was foreclosing, and the Ross’s were too tangled in legal proceedings to care. Leah’s father had been arrested the day before for beating his wife, and if he hadn’t been a solid suspect in his daughter’s disappearance to start, he sure was after. Bail was set at half-a-million dollars.

  I asked around for possible rental of earth-moving equipment, but my efforts were halfhearted at best. Something in me demanded I use muscle instead of steel, so I bought a shovel and began trenching earth at the south end of the pond where the property dropped gradually into a lower valley, mindful of the spike-riddled brambles surrounding it.

  The whole time I dug, owls volleyed protest while flocks of starlings teased their raptor cousins in nearby corkscrew murmurations, and I imagined my mother quietly cheering me on.

  2018

  The following month, and the same gala atmosphere, the same dress-up game boarding the Petrichor.

  Though the women remain masked, I recognize many of the same male faces as before. Some I match easily to Billy Wentz’s ledger, including a freshly billionaired app designer named Cedric Aslam, recently interviewed on NPR and CNN.

  Before long I spy Brook arriving in a blacked-out SUV. Elements of wicker and lattice to her outfit this go around. Despite the prickly textile, her curves imbue grace to the burlap. The perfect setting for her milk-glass skin, the vulpine features, the soft jade eyes, or so my assumption from the lone black-and-white picture I was shown.

  In the interim four weeks, I touched base with Neil West several times. Laid out a tale of false leads and misdirection. He would just simper behind a cigar, glance at my four-year-old boobs, my platinum blonde tresses, my gloves, and drum his fat fingers on the desk. The skulls were gone. He’d just needed their lure. Their scent. Maybe he knew everything about me, or nothing at all, but the mystery resided in the bored, mouse-play eyes of cats teasing their prey. I was ready right then to ditch this case—was ready to pay him to do so—but Brook had long braided herself to my brain’s wrinkles.

  This evening, in addition to the woven costume, Brook wears blue flowers in her hair. The way my mother was fond of orange nasturtium in hers.

  I hope at first that Brook’s are hydrangeas, but another rack-focus through my camera verifies hyacinths, and I feel the chill of a morning, as when my mother’s empty casket was lowered into the dirt.

  2004

  Where Leah was eventually found, hyacinths grew in late spring along a hiking path, one that hundreds walked by daily while she slowly expired, myself included. But by then I’d discovered the pond.

  Later, I would attribute my obsession to the drought. A thirsty man’s groping for a mirage. But it was a roundabout lie. The kind my father often told about my mother. How she supposedly went scuba diving to find pearls, strike it rich, and run away. But I never felt anything untoward about her dives. Like her, I relished my alone time, even at nine, and often I’d watch her leave early in the morning during the rain, as her preferred cove would be empty of all souls. When she returned, I would always note her scarred fingers and chipped nails from pulling oysters and muscles barehanded, and she would always explain how much she relished the feel of their rough shells against her skin. How it felt like accomplishment. She’d show me her sliced, pruned fingers, and I’d kiss the tips to make them better, and she in turn would kiss the tips of mine as a way to keep me from chewing my nails. And if I promised to stop biting—and if she promised to wear gloves—we could keep kissing our fingers. But we never kept our words. It was who we were, and between us, fibby promises were perfectly acceptable.

  One day, a few months before she went diving for the last time, I sat on the porch helping her shuck oysters she’d caught that morning, and I asked if she indeed was looking for pearls. Her face slackened, as it tended to whenever posed left-field question, as if just remembering a crucial appointment freshly elapsed. She swallowed a dry, sharp lump, and said no. That she loved their taste. The smell of them. Like fresh rain.

  I asked if she’d ever felt scared under all that water, and only then did she truly smile, and I glimpsed the beauty long denied to the rest of the world, including herself.

  She said, “Underwater, yells turn to whispers, Max. Underwater, gravity drops you at quarter the speed.”

  2018

  As before, the Petrichor leaves at midnight on the dot, only this time I’d hired a retired cop, Olson, with a runabout to follow it.

  He tries deterring me at first, scratching his Castro beard and putting bottle caps with his Sperrys. Hides his misogyny behind excuses—how the moneyed could afford to protect their whims, violently if need be, and so forth. He also seems, like the Ross’s neighbors regarding the pond, shockingly superstitious of the water despite being a boater. Haunted, even. Wary of rip-currents and man-eaters. Of appetites older than the oceans themselves.

  But a boat loan trumps trepidations, and once I offer him a quarter of my fee, he caves fast. Swaps scratching his whiskers for tugging on them before unwinding the mooring lines from the cleats while humming some Dixie.

  He conjures my father, pinching at his chin fat and humming while glaring out the bay window in the dining room, waiting for my mother to return from one of her day-long oyster dives.

  2004

  Under a pair of camping lanterns, I dug away at the loam with the spade until a wool-like mist furled over the dark water and veiled the dance of firefly. Now and then I’d spot ripples on the surface, but as I’d lock on a spot, nothing ever breached.

  At some point, I don’t know when, I found myself digging by hand. One moment I was planting the shovel into tannic mud, the next I was on my knees bailing handfuls with my bare palms. It started normally enough, insofar as normal applied, but soon I fell into a frenzy, dragging mud and raking my hands across plaits of barberry branch. The closer I got to the pond’s inner face, the colder the mud got, and the quieter the world clamored. I felt the peace my mother felt underwater, and the less I felt the stab of thorn against my fingers. I thought of the calcified surface of bivalves instead, and in the final heaves of gritty muck and ripping of tough branch and root, the water crowned through the oily soil, first as liquid wicking into paper towel, then seeping faster, until finally, losing all pretense of restraint, it gushed.

  The initial torrent before it ate away the surrounding soil nearly toppled me down the embankment, and I flailed and rope-burned along yards of jaggy brambles before my elbows caught against a crook of banyan roots.

  Righting myself, I shimmied up and back, and watched the spill. Being a small, shallow lagoon, the
water drained slowly, but continuously down into the valley below where many of the hiking trails converged into a hub.

  My hands were so numb from the cold that the pond was halfway drained before I noticed the blood. It wept down to my elbows, pumping slowly from the tips of my fingers where most of my nails were partially pried or ripped off altogether. Cockspur thorn and barberry spear grew from the nail beds and finger flesh in inverted teepee poles.

  Before the numbness wore off, I used my teeth to pull out the longer thorns while deer and raccoons from the lower valley ran by me, seeking higher ground as if from a fickle god’s flood.

  ***

  Hours of crippling anxiety later, with dawn boiling behind the eastern foothills, and no monsters lay beached under the smother of magnolia and holly. Nothing but old, steaming car parts, horse bones, and several large snapping turtles trying to burrow into the slimy bottom. The squiggle of moccasin.

  No Leah Ross. Only the smothered history of small-town graft and meanness.

  My satisfaction tasted like ash, and just before noon, as I stared at the glossy silt and my fingers began screaming, it started to rain. Rained harder than it had in a year, and the world stunk of lead.

  2018

  We give the Petrichor some lead before following.

  The whole time, Olson talks my ear off. All kinds of war stories, and of all the ladies he’d charmed in Saigon without speaking a lick of Vietnamese. Tales of his youth in Jefferson Parish, and of how he and his kid would shoot out the windows of condemned houses after Hurricane Carmen as a kind of therapy. That if you owned a gun, no one should have to pay for analysis. How I reminded him of his late wife. That she was a dancer with similar hair. An intrepid explorer of her sexuality, especially for the times, and that no one man could please her.

  I snort or guffaw where appropriate, giving him what he needs in order to stick close to the Petrichor.

  At one point he even tries explaining what petrichor means, and though I already know, I keep nodding as if this is new information, and he keeps piloting the chop with a mountain goat’s confidence.

  ***

  It’s not long before the Petrichor strays from the shipping lanes and veers north. Fog soon presses on the dark brine, and a smoke-colored sky deploys its drizzle.

  Several miles northwest of Edmonds, the Petrichor stops, powers down its engines, and kills its lights. Moments later, the clatter of anchor and punch into the water. Enough moon lingers to ghost its lines through the brume, so Olson snuffs the outboard and we float a safe distance away, inhaling the mist that’s so like the tinny drift off the south coast of Portland, Maine, where I grew up.

  Twenty minutes in, a faint light comes to life under the Petrichor’s keel. A kind of spectral nimbus. Mantis in hue.

  Before long, whale song trills through the fog, mounting in intensity until it envelops us fully, and moments later, wakes of massive unseens teeter-totter the runabout, swaying the boat until water sloshes over the sides. Humps of things mottled and phosphorescent breach the dark roil around us, surging towards the Petrichor.

  On one of the heavier swings, Olson pitches to the right and clocks his temple against the gunwale. Palming his head, blood seeps fast between his fingers, and I grab one of the cleaner engine rags from a toolbox and press it to his wound. He wails and curses but lets me work, much the way my mother did as I dabbed the cut on her right cheek after a fight with my father a week before she disappeared. Later that night, before crawling into my bed to sleep, I still picture the tiny petal of nasturtium she peeled from her clotting wound, and placed on the nightstand next to my porcelain Saturn nightlight.

  The water continues to heave as more unseen marine life rolls towards the ferry, and I think fleetingly of the emptying pond, and the few occasions I was sure something had broken the surface, and as Olson edges towards full panic, I offer quarter and the outboard guns us back towards Seattle.

  For a while I smell the same fresh-rain waft of oysters, and of the exposed mineral bed of the pond—so like the smell of my mother’s blood—but ultimately I chalk it up to the nickel stink of failure. The first few weeks after my mother went missing—before the police had ended their search and determined her drowned—I’d taken to biting my nails to the quick. To quell the pain, I’d swim the calm, icy shores of her cove myself, scouring the silty bottom for signs of her, raking my fingers against barnacled rock, staying under until my lungs felt like they would melt through my ribs. Afterwards, shivering on shore, I would start kissing my fingertips, only to end up gnawing at the numb flesh until my digits resembled hers. The pungent air tasted of brass.

  Under the icy spray of Puget Sound I flex my gloved fingers against a different kind of cold, and decide that tomorrow I’m going to let the old man in on what I’ve learned outside the Petrichor. Then I’m gonna pay Cedric Aslam a visit so he can say what he knows about the inside of it.

  2004

  Leah Ross’s body was found five months after she’d disappeared. Found at the bottom of a defunct well after a hiker strayed off the path for a piss and crashed through the rotted wood planks covering the opening.

  The medical examiner allowed me to see the x-rays as a courtesy. All those broken bones, some long healed. Her film looked like a map of fault-lines.

  2018

  “You’ve got till the first of the year to find out where she goes, and then I’m cutting you off.”

  The old man speaks around his cigar and through slotted eyes. His hands keep balling and stretching across the seam of his desk, and I’m not sure if I’d heard the off at the end of his final sentence or not.

  I can’t stop looking at his fingers. The appetite in them.

  “I might have something,” I say, not sure what I mean, not sure how much I’m going to divulge until he crosses his arms at last and pinches at the fat of his chin.

  “Do you, now?” he says. His grin swings to the right, and his cigar skips across his teeth in pursuit. “You know, you all do have ways of making us believe we’re the lesser.”

  “What?” I say, though I’d heard him well enough.

  My father’s grin, alive before me as when I was nine.

  “That we’re the ones who are broken. Weak. The ones who can never—“

  Without thinking, I yank off my blonde wig.

  Neil’s mouth quivers into a donut. His eyes narrow and pop at the bobby-pins and net holding down my natural dark brown hair. Their incongruity with the careful mascara, the rouge on my cheeks, the cabernet of my lipstick.

  And then he starts to laugh, birthing as a sigh, only to break up into childish titters that double him over in his chair.

  Giggles like I might’ve once issued as a boy under my mother’s tickling fingers.

  I draw Billy Wentz’s .38 and fire.

  The bullet enters Neil’s right cheek, and dammit if his chortles don’t still linger a beat before the fingers of both hands scrawl against his face, as if trying to peel at an old, set piece of scotch tape than to staunch a fresh bullet hole. His stogie tumbles out and blood jets onto his desk where it melds easily with its hues. And as his foul mouth opens to cry out or laugh some more, I put a second bullet into his right eye, and he slumps dead in his chair.

  At the copper bar sink adjacent to his desk, I swallow some water straight from the tap before taking off my gloves. The suction pull from the foam latex tips sewn into the leather always evokes in me teeth being yanked free. I run my fingers under the cold water. The five amputated tips still feel present after fourteen years, like muttered indictments. The regrown nails, split and discolored and blading in from the matrix at odd angles, are always louder in their charge.

  No sooner am I outside again that it starts to sprinkle. My nose twitches, but I keep my wig off. That acrid scent of fresh rain on dry soil or asphalt after a week without it. It now smells like blood to me. Everything does, it seems, as I near my own end.

  ***

  Cedric Aslam lives in a converted loft
near Pioneer Square, but as I approach his building I see him walk out and so I follow him to a nearby pub where I cozy up to him at the end of the bar.

  I put my PI card before him, and he picks it up and studies it both close and from afar. He’s a blemishless twenty-five, with a healthy, unkempt mane of hair and large, bulging eyes wobbling for clarity.

  Still coming down from the high of last night’s ride on the Petrichor, he smiles as his eyes crawl up and down my body before nodding and then reading aloud the information on my card, a taste of British to his voice.

  “What can you tell me about that boat?” I ask.

  The barkeep approaches and the kid orders a rum-and-coke before pointing at me as if to offer to buy, but I wave them both off. I’m only there for information.

  “The . . . boat?” says Cedric, and chuckles. “I’m not . . . supposed to talk about . . . the boat. Part of the . . . NDA.”

  I place a hundred on the bar. “All the drinking you want tonight for whatever you can tell me.”

  He side-eyes the bill as if it might reach up and tickle him, and snorts more laughter. Then he spots my gloves, and his chuckles morph into coughs.

  “What did you take last night?” I ask.

  Amazingly, his eyes widen even further.

  “I’ve never, ever taken shit . . . like that before. It’s like, you remember the . . . The feelings . . . yeah? But like not . . . the details. They’re like . . . dream pills. But I . . . I really can’t talk about it. You know, the . . . ”

  “The non-disclosure, yeah. I can respect that, Cedric.” His drink comes and he gulps half of it in one shot. I say, “Was just wondering how I can experience what you did. I’ve heard things about that boat. Amazing things.”

  He looks at me as I’d just offered him one of my own organs to keep him alive.

  “Oh yeah? Did you hear about . . . the food? The rare game? It’s the . . . It’s the greatest thing I’ve ever . . . But the girls . . . ” He passes a hand over his mouth, then starts to whisper. “I’m sorry, the . . . ladies, I mean. I ain’t ever . . . I mean, it ain’t just fucking. It’s like . . . love.”