Disturbed Earth

by Reggie Nadelson

  "You're not saying he had her killed, your mother?"

  Genia said, "Oh, Artemy, you remember these days, it was like bad spy novel. It wasn't always so simple, so crude. Things happened. People got sent to different cities. Children went to orphanage or were adopted. Me, I had both. For a while I had nice family to live with, but poor and like peasants, no culture, no books. Then back to orphanage. It was OK, I don't go to some gulag, probably not even my mother went. People like my mom just evaporated into a different life."

  "Do you know where Billy is?"

  "I heard Johnny's mother mention Breezy Point," Genia said. "She doesn't know I heard. I was going to call you as soon as I got rid of her. I think you should go there, Artemy. Just go, OK?" Abruptly, Genia kissed me on the cheek three times, Russian style, and retreated towards her big house, then turned to watch me.

  It was after three in the morning when I drove away and in the rear-view mirror I could just see Genia through the foggy night. Lit up from the light on her porch, she stood and rocked, arms locked around her body, like an old Russian woman trying to sell her shoes on the street and knowing no one would buy them.

  I held onto the idea that Billy was alive. The fog closed in. Barely able to see my own headlights, I drove towards Breezy Point. I knew I should have smashed down the door on the fishing shack, but I should have done a lot of things.

  Looking in the rear view, seeing my own face, I knew what Genia had told me was true. From my pocket, I got out a picture of Billy and put it on the dashboard; in it I saw my father's ghost. It was the kind of resemblance you might not see if you didn't look for it, if you didn't know the truth, but once you knew, it was obvious: my father was Billy's grandfather. The same piercing perfect blue eyes; the sweet smile; the blond hair. I looked in the mirror again. I had my mother's dark hair and my eyes were a different blue, but I could see the resemblance between the three of us. Had I known? Had I known this all along?

  I thought about my father, about the day he came home and told us he was no longer needed, and I heard my parents fighting. He said he was sad, losing his job. My mother called the KGB monsters and slammed the door. Eventually we all left Moscow and went to Israel and she hated it. She thought it was provincial, but my father liked it.

  Mossad guys came to the apartment in Tel Aviv and sat with him and he advised them. He had been a top intelligence strategist, and they liked him and played chess with him. He wasn't even Jewish but he was OK with Israel. He died because he got on the wrong bus one day and it was bombed. My mother was left behind in a country she hated.

  I drove back to Marine Park and over the bridge where, for the second time, a state trooper stopped me and joked about Red Alert, then warned me about the fog. A ship had run aground off Jersey. Most of the roads on Long Island were shut because of the fog. Take it easy, he said, and I said I would, but as soon as I was over the bridge, I picked up speed.

  Billy was out there. Heshey Shank knew about the fishing shack and he had taken Billy to it, I was sure now; I tried to believe Billy was still alive. I smoked and talked to myself and drove as fast as I could on the roads that were solid ice. I hit the accelerator hard and Mike's van rattled and pie boxes flew off the seat. I didn't care. I inhaled nicotine as deep as I could and watched Jamaica Bay, where fog lapped the wetlands, and it came to me, this thing in my own past. I felt both terrified and relieved. I felt like an Alzheimer's patient on the verge of release from the jail cell, the lock-up of my own memory.

  36

  It was like paradise, the first time he wentfishing. It wasn't a word he was supposed to know: paradise. It wasn't a word people used in public, not forbidden, but not nice. He didn't know what it meant but he read about it in books and he read that people said the word in churches, though he had only been in a church once when it was raining and he got caught and sheltered in an old run-down church where a few elderly women kneeled and moaned and prayed.

  For him paradise was a place where there was a river. Paradise, he imagined, felt like this, blisful, cool, a breeze off the water. Normally he was a city kid. The countryside was usually boring, a place where people talked about mushrooms and the Russian soul. He was a city kid. He liked Moscow's winding streets and the ramshackle old houses and shops where you could get certain records and books that no one else had. He liked the food markets. He was drawn to places in the huge gray city where there was color, especially in the winter.

  This part of the countryside, this place by the river, was different—the fishing, the sitting in the sun, the being with his father. It was only a little river, a crook in a river, the place where it turned in a different direction.

  The water was cold and clear and the two of them sat on the edge and dangled their lines and ate ice cream. He was ten. He could remember every detail, the silver birch trees, tall and thin, the leaves like coins rustling when the breeze blew, the hot sun, the damp of the bank under his thighs, mossy damp, cool and solid. His bare feet were in the water; his toes dug in the cold squishy mud.

  For years and years afterwards, he could remember the days by the river, the exact way the river looked, the stones in it, the feel of the mud, taste of the sour vanilla ice cream, the tall man beside him. The ice cream came in a paper cone. Birds chirped in the trees or the hedges, though he didn't think of it as chirping. Humming. They hummed and twittered.

  He had a canvas satchel on the ground next to him. It was the bag he used for school, but it contained thick slabs of good white bread and real sausage made with meat and yellow cheese and hard-boiled eggs. It also held fishing line and a can of grubs he'd dug up in a friend's backyard. There were books in it, too: Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens because hisfather approved of Charles Dickens; an American western novel by Zane Gray that he'd read so many times the pages were falling out. His father pretended not to notice when he read silly books. He glanced over at his father who was leaning against a tree, his pants rolled up over his calves, his shoes and socks on the ground next to him, his bare feet just touching the water. The fishing line looped lazily from the pole he held lightly in one hand. The smoke from his cigarette curled up into the tree above him. Once in a while, he turned his head slightly and opened his eyes and smiled at his son next to him on the river bank.

  He could remember all of it, even the texture and color of the fish that he caught, a short fat silvery fish thatfopped on the grassy bank where they sat, but, as the years passed, he couldn't quite picture the man beside him, his still young handsome father. It was his father, he was sure of it, but he could never get the picture back.

  The storm came up out of nowhere. The humidity rose. The heat simmered up like a bathhouse filling with steam. The sky turned dark as if a fuse had suddenly blown and all the lights went out. Then the lightning cut across the sky and the trees rattled their leaves and rain smashed down on them. The man grabbed him by the hand, and he tried to grab the fish and his satchel and both of them dropped out of his hand.

  Then he looked and saw it wasn't the narrow familiar river, but huge, too wide to cross without a boat. Rostov, hisfather called it. A big city called Rostov on the Don River. An important port, his father said, a crossroads, a canal to the Volga, a place of important shipping and rail transport, of science and culture. When he was a boy, he had worked on the big rivers, he had been on a life journey, he had been part of a great revolution, he said, still a romantic, sentimental man.

  In the port—his father was allowed in ports because of his job—they walked by the big freighters. The wind blew off the river, the cargo nets swayed in the sky above them. They were heavy nets made of thick rope. Bulging with giant crates like shopping in immense string bags, one of the nets was lowered into the hold of a ship. And when it was lifted out, it was empty. The empty net swung faster, and he remembered trying to run backwards, his father holding his hand. He felt the net was coming to pick him up, trap him, entangle him so he could never escape. Maybe someone would force his head in between the thick
ropes. He had heard how it happened.

  Somewhere, he heard about a boy or man whose head was forced into the openings of a net. The squares that made up the nets were big and the rope was strong, big and strong enough for a man to get his head stuck in. He had heard that somewhere, and he didn't know by whom or where, these nets were used as restraints. As punishment for people who committed crimes. He heard that if you got your head stuck or if someoneforced it into the square of rope, you strangled to death. It took a long time. It took days for a boy or man to strangle to death.

  In spite of the cold, I was sweating. Thinking about Billy, about the fishing trip the summer before on Shank's boat, had triggered it. The trip when the fish spilled out of our bucket on the dock in a storm and Billy caught them in his net. I had mixed them up, the trip with Billy, the fishing with my father and the stories about the punishment nets.

  I had always remembered the fishing trips to the little river bend. To Nikolina Gora outside Moscow, where my father had a friend with a dacha, a famous, official writer. But I had never until now remembered the trip to Rostov. We went in a plane. It was a big deal. Before we went, everyone talked about the river at Rostov, the wonderful quality of the water, the fish that swam in it. It was a big deal because people didn't travel much and I had never been on a plane, but I had pushed it out of my mind. I had forgotten Rostov. Now I remembered the port and the cargo ships and the heavy nets and the kid in Moscow who told me about the KGB's use of nets for punishment.

  When I asked my mother, she told me to keep quiet about it, but I didn't. I asked my Uncle Gennadi, who was my father's best friend and who was in the KGB with him, and I asked my father. Did you? I asked. Did you do that?

  By their silences and grim looks I knew not to ask again, but I also knew it was one of them, or both, who had been involved in the use of nets. Or they knew. At least they knew.

  37

  When I realized I'd fallen asleep at the wheel, I began to panic. I was desperate, I'd been up all night, it was almost morning, I didn't know how long I could go on.

  The road was slick and bumpy, the van seemed out of control as raw brush along the shoulder scratched at my door. The Golden Nets Beach Club was at the end of a long narrow road off the highway, past Breezy Point where the shacks were.

  It was remembering the nets, Billy's net, the fishing with my father that made me recall a place I'd been with Maxine years earlier, when the twins were still little. It wasn't much to go on, but I was crazy enough to try.

  At the entrance to the beach club was a concrete hut; in the summer you paid a fee or showed your season pass or asked about the availability of cabanas. It was streaked with salt, dirt and snow, and it was empty, shut up for the winter.

  I drove through and parked at the back of the main building, a white wood structure that looked as if it dated from the 1930s. Signs, dripping with snow and fog, announced summer hours and pool openings, mahjong tournaments and a yoga class.

  I put my gun in my waistband, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, got out, locked the van and walked around to the front of the club on foot and went up the stairs to the main deck.

  The light from my flash illuminated part of the huge deck where there were three swimming pools, all empty. Near the entrance was a cafe with large glass windows and when I peered through one of them I could see a few tattered nets that had been painted gold and hung on the walls for decoration.

  On the far side of the deck was a railing and then the beach and the ocean, but I couldn't see the water and I could barely see the sand. Surrounding the deck were the cabanas, a long row of little wooden huts with the doors locked. In the summer, the doors open, there would be deck chairs in front of the cabanas. People in bathing suits would run in and out, laughing, eating, talking. There was also an upper level, with more cabanas and smaller lockers, that you reached by a long wooden staircase.

  Vaguely, as if in a long-forgotten dream, I remembered the scene: the little kids running and screaming in and out of the baby pools; older kids showing off on the diving board; the brightly colored deck chairs, green and white, and the oiled bodies of women in bikinis; the older men, their bellies hanging over their shorts, playing checkers or cards at rickety card tables. A jumble of color, yellow sun, blue pools, the azure ocean, it was like a child's drawing of paradise.

  Except for my flash, it was pitch dark. As I made my way along the ground level, I heard something, the constant banging of a door to one of the cabanas; somewhere in the fog, a door was hanging loose on its hinges, banging constantly; I couldn't see it until it was in front of me. I yanked it open and turned the flashlight on the interior.

  Inside was a big old fashioned humpback refrigerator, the enamel chipped; a microwave sat on a card table next to a small TV. There were three canvas chairs. Behind a plastic curtain with seashells on it was a shower. There was also a large wooden locker painted green. It was locked.

  With a pocket knife I pried the lock open and pulled back the lid. Inside were pots and pans, an electric kettle and faded beach towels. Nothing else. I went back out. I closed the door and twisted the wire that held it shut. From somewhere there seemed to be a faint sound, but it was only the water, I told myself, only the wind. I climbed the stairs to the second level.

  Near where I stood was a long row of lockers for people who didn't have cabanas and used them to change and stash their clothes while they swam. The other side of the narrow platform where I stood, away from the lockers, was a high wire fence with barbed wire on top. Through it, when I turned the flashlight to my right, I could see the parking lot. The way the light fell, the long alley of lockers ahead of me on one side and the high wire wall on the other, it looked like a jail, a row of cells, a lock-up.

  To keep myself calm, I lit a cigarette and tossed the match away and thought, for a second because I was half out of my mind with fatigue, that I hadn't put it out. The old wooden club would go up in flames in a second. I waited. Nothing happened, but again I heard the faint noise. This time I knew it wasn't the wind or water; a tiny creaking noise, not far away from where I stood, reached me. I held my breath. From where I was I could barely see a foot ahead.

  Slowly I felt my way down the row of lockers, the rough wood icy and wet under my hand. I reached the last door in the row and it was ajar and I wanted to turn and run as ghosts seemed to rise up out of the fog, but I pulled it open. I turned the flashlight on the interior.

  From the ceiling hung a fixture for a single bulb. The bulb had been removed. By a piece of heavy rope hung a cat. The noise I'd heard came from the faint creak of the wooden ceiling as the dead cat swung in the wind that blew through the cracks between the wood slats of the locker.

  Scruffy, orange and white. I unhooked it. It was frozen stiff. The wire coat hanger it was hanging from came off in my hand. I put the dead cat on the floor.

  I went on, turned the corner, looking in locker after locker. At the end of the row, closest to the beach and the ocean, were four big cabanas, like cottages, overlooking the sweep of the Atlantic Ocean. All of them were padlocked and bolted. Again, as with the cat, I thought I heard a faint sound.

  One at a time, I leaned up against the doors, my ear against the wood planks, trying not to breathe. At the last one, I thought I heard something. My gun was in my hand. I tried the door handle; the door wouldn't give and the walls were solid. There was a window, though and I used the butt of my gun to chip away enough glass to loosen the frame, then pulled out part of the pane and reached through it and unlocked the window.

  The dread I felt had a palpable shape, it took a solid form, it filled the space with horror and I almost backed away and turned and ran, but there was nowhere to go.

  Billy? Billy?

  I was talking to myself. Shoving open the broken window, I climbed through and stepped down into the wire mesh of the window screens that were piled on the floor for the winter. The metal mesh caught at my ankle and I pulled my foot out and I heard the wire rip
. I turned my flashlight on the room. There was a table, three plastic chairs, a TV on a stand; outdoor furniture was neatly stacked.

  At the far side of the room was a door and from behind it came the sound I had heard except it was louder now. I stumbled against the table in the semi-darkness.

  Billy?

  Someone was in the bathroom. Billy, I thought. Billy. I yanked the door open.

  38

  The first thing I saw when I turned the beam of my flashlight on the room was a tangled mess of gold colored fishing nets like those I'd seen in the beach club cafe. Trapped in them like a large animal was Heshey Shank. He was a big man and his body sprawled across the bathroom floor, his feet under the rusty sink, his head near a toilet with a broken seat. Above him from a white plastic rod hung a shower curtain with clowns on it that was smeared with blood.

  The nets were heavy; they were draped over him and twisted around his limbs, head and arms. I crouched beside him. Blood was everywhere. He was naked from the waist up. A faint animal noise came out of his mouth.

  I pushed my hand through the nets, my fingers caught in the knotted strings, and tried to find a pulse in his neck. The flesh was still warm, though a sheen of cold clammy wetness clung to it. The flesh was cut, I could feel it, and when I put the flashlight on Shank, I saw small chunks had been cut out of his cheek, one of his arms, his shoulder.

  Again I felt for a pulse, but there was none and even while I tried, desperate, frantic, to untangle him, the noise stopped. Shank was dead. It was as if he had waited for me before he gave up, or maybe not, maybe he had been dead for hours. I couldn't tell.