by Hugh Sheehy
Brad flailed his arms, scrubbing imaginary hands from his skin, and turned, gasping for breath, staring through the darkness at Erik. He made his hands into fists and punched Erik in both shoulders at once, pushing him back. “Motherfucker,” he barked. “Give me my flashlight! I’m going to kill you! Give me my flashlight!’
Erik stood dazed as the boy snatched the flashlight from his hand, picked up the other from the grass, and took off in a dead sprint up the gravel path in the direction of what he had already said was the road. He plunged into the darkness of the trees and, a moment later, his voice echoing from the road, shouted, “Let’s see you get back by yourself, asshole!” Then came the sound of his rubber soles pounding the pavement, and a moment later he was gone.
The sound of crickets closed in as Erik considered the boy’s challenge and shrugged it off, accepted that it was as stupid as it sounded. There was only one road through this park, his father had told him, and he had only to follow it back. He did not move just yet. He felt friendly with the night. He thought of Brad’s scream again and imagined him now, racing back to his house, too embarrassed and ashamed to see that he would soon decide against telling anyone what had happened out here, and then, gradually, so afraid of being alone in the dark that he wanted nothing more than to be back in the safety of his brightly lighted house. Slowly, and with more regret than he had ever expected, Erik began to laugh.
His mother drove home. His father had drunk too much beer. Wide awake, Erik sat in the back. The scratches on his shins hurt him the most, but he could nearly forget them in his search for the landmarks they had passed on the way here. The night had put them away. In the morning they would be set out for him to examine.
His father reminisced about high school and compared the party to the last reunion. “So Gerald and Donna got married and went into hiding in the woods. Weirdos.”
His mother had rolled down her window to help her ignore the monologue. Erik smiled to himself, cocking an ear to listen to his father.
“You know, Erik,” he said, “at one time I was engaged to Donna Dravinski, back when she was Donna Kelley. Way before I met your mother.” Erik thought he saw his mother smile. “Yeah, I dumped her. Dumb hippie. Then she started seeing Gerald, and they both avoided me. It was like we weren’t adults. They used to leave parties when I arrived.” He chortled.
Erik’s mother frowned. Erik leaned over the seat between his parents. His father turned to him, grinning, his breath full of beer. Large and jovial, he was a mad king, soaked in his happiness. Laughter bubbled up steadily from him. “Yeah, old Gerald, scared I was going to steal his woman! Scared everyone would! He moved to the woods. For safety!”
“Peter,” said Erik’s mother. “Come on.” Fighting back laughter, she frowned.
In the morning they would be themselves. Erik received the promise of Monday’s light, which missed the other side of the world. The pitted road swept beneath the car with its billion unimportant details. They were going home, where he still slept with the windows open. Each night, he listened for the first bird to wake up lost and call out to others, to let them know it was there, and to hear them call back.
VARIATIONS ON A THEME
When the park service truck pulled up, I was in the bathhouse office, penciling water temperatures in the logbook. The hum of the running engine gave me a nauseated kind of relief. Ranger Chuck jogged in, kid face showing through red beard, soda bottle full of dip spit in hand. “You heard, right?” he said, meaning the radio traffic about the drowning in Volusia County.
The question made me flinch, though all day I’d kept the radio to my ear, hanging on each fuzzy word, while gray waves tossed fetid black seaweed onto the deserted beach. This guy must have been drunk, ignored repeated warnings, and wound up tangled and dead in the surf. The townies up north were blaming him, which probably seemed fair to about everyone but the bereaved.
“I was thinking we could go up there and get a peek at the body.” Chuck looked at the bathhouse’s collapsed sofa and the tide chart on the wall, growing uncertain as he translated his plan into words. “I’ve never even seen a body.”
He tapped fingers on the thighs of his khaki pants like a boy anticipating something sweet. I tried not to be offended. He didn’t know what happened with Elise back in Colorado. I hadn’t told anyone in Cape Canaveral. Limiting my response to a frown, I shut the logbook and considered the tobacco shreds stuck in his yellow teeth.
Okay, I thought. Let’s get you a peek.
The drive was thirty miles through the mosquito-infested palm forest and then across the causeway to a coastal plain disappearing under beach houses and commercial sprawl. Preferring the one-night-stand towns south of the monument, I never went up there, and so I ignored the dead armadillos on the road and the bugs collecting on the windshield and watched the shifting, iron-colored ocean go in and out of sight between the grassy dunes. Chuck sang along with Kenny Rogers and looked over at me from time to time.
The public wasn’t allowed past the morgue’s reception area, but Chuck knew the secretary, a plump, pretty young woman who burst into laughter when she saw him in his officer’s uniform. It must have been the way she remembered him from high school, because he wasn’t so much funny looking as young. By the way he toed the linoleum floor, I gathered people knew he was the kind of cop who confiscated tourist marijuana to smoke with the women he met at my bathhouse after hours.
“Don’t let the gun and badge trick you,” she said, toying with her large diamond engagement ring. “He’s the biggest criminal out here.”
“She thinks you’re worthy of a superlative,” I said.
Chuck shrugged. “Best reason to be a cop is you can break rules.”
He grew solemn under the fluorescent lights, looking down on the clay-colored naked body of a young man. The blue eyes were open and staring, the pupils oblong and different sizes. There should have been some rule against leaving them open, and I would have shut them myself, but when I glanced up, the coroner’s assistant, who begrudgingly tolerated our presence, was watching.
“It isn’t what I expected,” Chuck said. “I wish I could have done something.”
He’d told me many times not to count on his help during a rescue. He never touched the sea, fearing jellyfish and sharks and all the other things it hid from you, though maybe he would have turned heroic in a time of need. I guess you never know what you can do until you’re tested.
It was sad, seeing the dead guy. His swollen face was nicked up from the ocean floor, and he couldn’t have been older than twenty-five. When Elise’s car went down the ravine, her face was one thing that was spared in all the wreckage. For some shallow reason I had been comforted by this news, until I saw her and hardly recognized her with the facial muscles gone slack. She looked like some stranger wearing Elise’s face.
I didn’t know this guy before he died, though I was still sorry for him. You can’t help but imagine what the person must have been like. The attendant was watching, but I placed quarters over his eyes anyway. Fuck it, I thought. Throw me out.
Chuck approved with a nod and long, sentimental sniff.
That night I met a woman in a dance club on the beach. I’d come home to see the night get down to business in the park. Cicadas and darkness owned the palm forest. White-bellied lizards crossed my windows, hunting palmetto bugs and mosquitoes. It was one of those occasions I found myself suspecting that I shouldn’t have sold my car when I moved here. Down in Cocoa Beach, people were drinking in the clubs under the glowing walls of Ron Jon’s Surf Shop, getting naked on the dark beaches. Feeling great pressure to join in, I called a taxi.
Inside the crowded bar, anxious to pay my cover and get alcohol in my bloodstream, I noticed a college-type girl in a green cotton dress standing by a row of stacked tables in the rear of the place. From across the room she looked so much like Elise that I knew I’d have to examine her for differences. Contrary to my expectations, the likeness increased the longer I l
ooked. She had a chronic smiler’s monkey cheeks, the short black hair and keen eyes, the same ripe little body. I felt a number of contradicting emotions and knew it would be best to walk out and find another place to drink. At the same time, I’d been around long enough to know I’d regret never learning just how much like Elise she was. This look-alike was drinking something red, and by the noncommittal way she sipped and stood with her arms crossed and her head cocked, not quite watching the people on the dance floor, I gathered she was alone.
The resemblance was stunning — in appearance they were almost the same. This girl was a little thinner, with an unhealthy gauntness in her cheeks, as if my fiancée hadn’t eaten during her stay in the underworld. She narrowed her eyes as she watched me stare. Later she would say she was amused by the way I stood close and gawked, a tall man with grown-out blonde hair and a blue Hawaiian shirt, who had forgotten his own very conspicuous presence. She should have been alarmed. The city was filled with addicts and creeps and rapists, and so long as they had money, the good guys and bad guys all wore the same uniform. But the sense of familiarity between us erased all difficulty and concern. She put her drink’s tiny red stirring straw to her lips and took a long sip. She smiled ironically and offered to shake my hand.
“I’m Janine.”
“Okay,” I said, studying the lines in her neck, ignoring the hand. When she widened her eyes and laughed, it dawned on me how foolish I appeared. Her laughter was sharper, more cynical than Elise’s. My fiancée’s character had been entirely earnest and kind. The wry gaze of this young woman was reminder enough of their separateness. I smiled and shook her hand just as she was about to revoke the offer.
I got us drinks and she invited me to sit on her side of the booth. She was just twenty. From my perspective, a ten-year difference wasn’t much, but she knew better. She kept pinching my arm and poking me through my shirt, calling me dirty.
“Do you always hit on younger girls?”
I’d forgotten how young Elise had looked. “Well, the bar is for adults.”
She shrugged. “Soon I’ll be twenty-two and have to graduate and be serious.”
I cringed thinking what a pain in the ass I’d been at that age.
Two hours later we were sitting on the beach, alternating between talking and making out with medium intensity, part of the restraint arising from my sense of unreality. Meeting women had never been a great challenge, but this had taken almost no effort at all, as if Janine had come to the bar expecting to meet someone and, finding me before her, accepted fate’s offering without question. In fact, she was concerned with this very subject, using the little breaks from smooching to inquire about my zodiac sign and whether I knew anything about a fortune-teller who had told her to stop by after the bars closed.
“I have never heard of Madame Tammy,” I confessed. “However, not knowing her doesn’t prevent me from knowing it’s probably a bad idea to go over there at night.”
“I’d expect nothing less from a Leo,” she said, looking up at the dense cloud mass hiding the stars. “You fire signs always want to take control.”
“I am what I am.”
“You’re funny.”
“I am what I am,” I repeated. It was an old phrase of Elise’s, an extremely funny and sexy thing when spoken by a forthright young lady who wants you naked immediately. I thought that if I said it enough around Janine she might start saying it. Imagining this gave me a sick, impish glee.
After a while the bars emptied and the beach filled with the shapes of people seeking privacy and others who wanted to observe them. Janine and I both wanted to be alone, so she led me to where she’d parked.
During my time in Florida I rode shotgun in many a single woman’s vacuumed front seat. I loved the smell of bachelorettes’ cars, how by singing a woman driver revealed the sexiness of her girly music, how she smiled to carry off her find, how she might suddenly grab my hand or lean over at an intersection to start kissing. No other came close to exciting me like Janine did, and not only because she looked like Elise. Whenever it occurred to me how much fun I was having, she’d shoot me a mischievous look, as if she’d heard me thinking.
After trolling many a dark street, we ended up after-drunk in a neighborhood of bungalows on an indigent stretch of the beach. Wide-awake residents sat up in plastic chairs on their sunken lawns, pinching their mentholated cigarettes and watching. A starved-looking man in ratty jean cutoffs trotted a beach cruiser past my window. My fear of these people made me vigilant like a snorkeler who has swum up on a barracuda, but Janine showed no fear. She was searching the mailboxes for the fortune-teller’s address.
“I hope you know where you’re going,” I said, as we passed the Dead End sign. “We might have to back out of here pretty fast.”
“Hush now.” She looked for numbers on the dark little houses, which appeared tilted by the weight of the air conditioners in their windows. Cigarettes flared. Under her dress, I noticed, Janine wore a bikini spangled with stars. She leaned forward, and her nipples pressed through the thin material of the cups. I suddenly felt sure someone was in the backseat.
Seeing it was empty, I felt mildly disappointed.
“Don’t worry so much,” she said.
“I am what I am,” I said quietly.
“There she is.” In the road there stooped a bony, visibly drunk old woman in apparently nothing but an extra-large Bud Light T-shirt that hung to her knees. Beneath a mess of springy pink hair her eyes were half-closed. She beckoned for us to follow.
Janine and I held hands all the way to the rotten welcome mat. A shark’s jawbone hung on the door like a knocker, and inside the house was decorated as if gypsies had come to town years earlier and remodeled the place for her. Tapestries embroidered with mandalas were tacked to the walls. Beside the oil lamp burning on a small wooden table, near a dirty ashtray and the remains of a microwave dinner, lay a deck of Tarot cards.
Madame Tammy placed a medallion on her forehead and brought us cans of beer, saying in her deep, harsh voice, “Get yourselves a seat.”
Janine sat on the metal folding chair opposite the fortune-teller’s place. She pressed her hands between her knees in anticipation. “So, Dennis.” She sank her teeth into my name, the way Elise had. “What do you think the future has in store for me?”
I put a hand over my eyes. “I see you discovering your vandalized car, then filling out a police report. Later, I see you bitching about it over breakfast in my camper.”
“You promised you would teach me to surf,” she said.
“I saw that, also. Telling the future, one has to be selective, or it comes out babble. You have to tell just the edge, like in a Hemingway story.”
“Smartass, if you can’t zip it, wait outside,” Madame Tammy said, offering me a Pabst and pointing. “Having nonbelievers around sours my psychic zone.”
“I am what I am.”
“Who ain’t?” The fortune-teller waved her gnarled hand at the love seat. “Park it.”
I had never seen a reading before. Madame Tammy put Janine’s hands flat on the table. Then the old woman took up her Tarot deck and dealt out a dozen cards, face up. Janine leaned in close as the psychic brooded. Madame Tammy had somehow achieved clarity of mind, despite the hour, the alcohol, and the smoke. She sensed the cards’ gravity and began to mumble.
“What is it?” Janine said. “Is it bad?”
“Just give me a second,” Madame Tammy said. “There’s a good reading in here somewhere.”
Later, as we drove toward my place with an orange sun rising in the east, it wasn’t clear whether Janine would stay. She drove too fast on the empty beach road, talking angrily, upset about the future predicted for her. It’s just one more bad sign when the psychic refuses payment.
“Fucking Death? What the fuck is that all about?”
In this edition of cards he’d ridden a gaunt black horse, worn silver armor, had a skull for a head, and reached out a skeletal hand at a man lying i
n a pool of blood on the road. Madame Tammy had explained that the Death card wasn’t necessarily bad, that the figure of Death often signaled an impending change.
“Everyone knows that Death isn’t meant to be read literally,” I said. “They did years ago, anyway. It’s like a metaphor.”
“I was in fifth grade ten years ago,” she said. “And if it’s not a bad card, why is the guy on the road covered in blood?”
“Maybe he’s hurt, and Death’s doing the right thing. He’s offering him a lift.”
Janine glared at me. “That doesn’t help. I always get the bum deal. That’s my fate. The cards were just a reminder of what I already know. I get upset about that.”
“You shouldn’t.”
She narrowed her eyes and said, “I am what I am.” She said it in a mocking tone, but the voice was enough hers that, for a fraction of a second, she became Elise, animated and talking. I can still see her that way, wearing clothes my fiancée would never have worn, driving a car the likes of which she’d never had, in a part of the country she hated, like a moment from a parallel world in which she still lived.
I grabbed Janine by the shoulder and kissed her mouth. She parted her lips to let me taste lip balm and sour beer, then grabbed the back of my head, kissing me and pulling my head down so she could see while she braked. The beach road was clear, and the sun was coming up on the condominiums on the beach and the neighborhoods of shabby houses. There was no one around to see us groping each other, locked in fantasies allowed by how little we knew of each other.
In the apartment of the man I’d come to think of as my fiancée’s murderer, the police found a diary filled with observations about Elise. There were even photographs and transcriptions of conversations he’d had with her. It was evident from his notes that he had been a regular at the café where she waited tables in a white blouse and black pants, where she pinned her hair, looking almost like someone else. This other woman, this waitress, was the one the murderer loved, or so I told myself, believing he’d had no real intimacy with her, until a detective let me see his diary. Why the detective did this I do not know — he had a plain face with the look of just having dropped his smile — and I looked back on it as an act of cruelty, though of course my spite was mixed with gratitude. Maybe he thought it would jog my memory, make me reveal something crucial to the case. Or maybe he was attempting kindness, trying to say the murderer was my male inferior. But all the diary did was leave me with more questions. According to its pages, Elise knew her killer’s name. She flirted with him and told him details of our private life. She talked about our fights and made allusions to the sex we had. In trying to determine the amount of fantasy in the descriptions, I only grew more doubtful. Why hadn’t she mentioned him? How much had she kept from me?
