Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea

by Jonathan David Kranz

  Another running gag: Stone and his messages. His exhortations that employees conduct themselves with care, because everything they did “sent a message.” There were many things about the adult world that confused Ethan, and this “message” thing was one of them. The idea of doing or not doing a thing, not for its own good, but for some kind of message it might send, felt twisted, perverse. To be an adult was to be perpetually shadowed by your own ghost, the one sending messages.

  “That’s not the only thing,” Ethan said, trying to shoo the ghosts away with words. “There’s the Sizzleator.” Ethan took advantage of an open spot at the end of the sofa. An empty space, like a missing voice in a vocal trio, remained between himself and his father. Mr. Waters looked at the television, and Ethan looked at his dad, his scrabbly, unshaven face, the electric shocks of uncombed hair falling over his brow.

  “Ah,” Mr. Waters said. “Walter’s kingdom. Finally, after all these years, he’s worked his way up to the Sizzleator.”

  Ethan coughed up a modest laugh. He wanted to be on his father’s side, and in a way, it was funny, Walter in charge of something. But in another way, it wasn’t. There was something brittle in his father’s eyes, small olive pits of bitterness.

  “There’s graffiti on the front of it,” Ethan said.

  “Front of what?”

  “Front of the Sizzleator. Just under the counter.”

  “Huh.”

  “In magic marker. Red. Really bright. Can’t miss it.”

  “He’ll paint over it,” Mr. Waters said, “eventually. But will he use primer first? Probably not. Nope.”

  Ethan wanted his father to ask what the graffiti said, and he didn’t want to have to ask him if he wanted to know. “From the boardwalk, it’s hard to miss.”

  Voices from the television only amplified the silence. Ethan picked up the Swiss Army knife from the coffee table and pried open the pen knife blade. He wondered why a blade so squat and stubby was called a “pen knife.”

  “It sends a message,” Ethan said.

  “What?”

  “The graffiti on the Sizzleator. ‘Don’t fall.’ That’s what it says.”

  More noise from the television. Two men on parallel screens but in different rooms were arguing alone into their respective cameras.

  “Huh.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “What means?”

  With the edge of the blade perpendicular to his thumb, Ethan tested the blade against his nail. It was something he had seen people do when they wanted to know how sharp a knife was. “Don’t fall,” he said.

  “Jesus, Ethan,” Chuck said, swiping the knife from Ethan’s hands. “It’s a tool, not a toy.” He smacked it on the table with a decisive thunk.

  “What do you think it means?”

  Chuck rolled on his back, facing the ceiling. “If it’s supposed to be advice,” he said, “I don’t think it’s very helpful.”

  “You know what I don’t get?” Ethan said, speaking toward the television. “Jason hated the ocean, hated the beach. What was he doing out on a jetty?”

  “Ethan—”

  “You ever see him in the water? Or even close? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Make sense?” Chuck had slung a forearm over his eyes, as if blocking an intense sun or averting a gory, horror-movie climax. “Of course it doesn’t make sense. Jason was smart, but he was still a kid, and kids his age do senseless things. I did. You will. And that night, Jason did too.”

  “I just don’t see it,” Ethan said.

  “That’s the problem,” said Chuck. “We don’t want to look.”

  * * *

  At seven, Ethan took his daily call from his mother. He could hear sirens and car horns in the background, the roar and drift-off of passing motors. “How’s New York?” he asked.

  “I’m sitting on a fire escape,” she said. There was something girlish in her voice, as if she were leaning into a circle of girlfriends. A fire escape! Can you imagine? Just like the movies. “How are you?”

  “Same as yesterday.” When he wasn’t on the phone with her, he was buzzing with a million things to say, all of them jostling for attention. Now, he couldn’t think of one.

  “How is your father?” she asked, the “is” drawn out like the buzz of a ripsaw. “How is he?”

  Ethan shrugged into the phone. “Okay.”

  “Has he found work?”

  “Some,” Ethan said. Then, “None. He’s waiting for Stone.”

  Ethan could practically hear his mother roll her eyes. “Nothing changes,” she said.

  “When are you coming home?” She’d left in March. Three months and counting. And Ethan counted.

  “Ethan…”

  “Just asking.”

  “Remember what Dr. Rogers said?”

  Lowering his head, Ethan shielded himself from the coming lecture.

  “About making assumptions? The vicious cycle? First you make assumptions, then you make poor choices based on those assumptions?” Ethan didn’t need to see her to know she was making a circling motion with her hands, pedaling the air on a fire escape in New York City.

  “And poor choices lead to stupid actions,” Ethan said.

  “Dr. Rogers wouldn’t say ‘stupid,’ would he?”

  “Irresponsible. Irresponsible actions lead to destructive consequences.…”

  “Which in turn…?”

  “Inspire false assumptions,” said Ethan.

  “You’re making progress.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Oh, Ethan.”

  * * *

  Any other place, it would have been ridiculous to hope for a job this late in the season. But the Sizzleator was known for high turnover. It was even something of an insider’s joke, a badge of Sea Town authenticity, to work at the Sizzleator at least once for a month or two, for as long as you could stand the heat and the grease, the burns on your arms, the stupidity of its management. Even though everyone knew how miserable it was, there was an air of inevitability about the Sizzleator. It had become the place to go when you applied too late for anything better or missed a shift once too often somewhere else and lost what you had. For Ethan, it looked like a passage, a place he could enter as one kind of person then leave as someone different—if nothing else, as a veteran of a common experience.

  “I don’t know that I need anybody,” Walter said, wiping the counter with a dirty dishrag. It was almost eleven o’clock at night, close to closing time.

  “Maybe not right now—” Ethan said.

  “Maybe not you,” said Walter.

  A year ago, things would have been very different. But that was a year ago. Before Chuck Waters took the fall for the accident on the roller coaster. Before Jason fell in the ocean.

  Ethan pointed to the graffiti under the counter, the only place it had survived on the boardwalk. “You’re going to have to take care of this.”

  “I know my business.”

  “You’ll need primer. Two coats.”

  “Listen, Little Waters.” Walter leaned across the counter. “This is my place. It may not be much, but it’s mine.”

  “I know where Stone keeps stuff,” Ethan said. “Paints. Rollers.” He looked up at Walter. “T-shirts. Aprons.”

  “I got all the stuff I need.”

  You think so? Ethan thought. He wondered what leverage he might have as Chuck Waters’s son. What would he know that Walter would not? Probably that the job others envied, caretaker to a world of amusements, was much more tedious than they would expect, much less about rides, cotton candy, and pinball machines, and more about glowing computer screens, about blank spots on spreadsheets that demanded to be filled. Then it occurred to him: “What about the numbers?” he asked triumphantly.

  The double take may have been a work of Hollywood fiction, but the craning of the neck, the turning sideways of the head left and right, the eyes sweeping the landscape for witnesses, that was real. Or at least it was fo
r Walter. Jason had always said Walter was a clown.

  “Bullshit,” Walter said. “You can’t mess with the spreadsheets. Even your father can’t. Not now.”

  “We don’t have to,” Ethan said. “I can tell you what to put in. And what not to put down.”

  “Bullshit,” Walter said again. But much more softly, more a caress than a curse. He looked intently at some point in the middle distance, as if watching a slide show of the possibilities: reports of inventory purchases higher than their true costs, records of sales lower than true revenues. In between these two poles of what really was and what was written down, there gleamed the promise of easy cash just asking to be taken. “You’re completely full of shit,” said Walter.

  Ethan smiled: he had just gained entry to the Sizzleator.

  June 23, 2013

  Stone himself stopped in today and dropped a bomb in our laps: his daughter would now be manager of the Moon Walk Mini Golf. He drew us together in a huddle, Mike alert, Eugene following the speech over the rim of his glasses, and Amy as mute and still as a Buddha, erecting a force field of indifference around her. This daughter was conspicuously absent, and Stone, hands on hips, spoke forcefully in a way that was both blunt and vague. “You’re going to see changes,” he said, but for the rest of us, gazing at the ground between our feet, there wasn’t anything specific to focus on, just big talk of “change,” “leadership,” and a new satellite in the Stone universe, “flexibility.”

  I give Mike credit; when Stone pulled him aside to give him the new marching orders, he had the balls to hold his ground—at least for a while. I was just within earshot, tinkering with the lunar lander at the eighth hole. When it works right, a ramp painted to look like a ladder briefly touches the ground, inviting the putt up and through the lander itself. It moves slowly, but it’s still one of the trickier holes.

  Naturally, the ramp jams all the time—in an obscene position suggesting a passionate desire for the ninth hole. Inside the lander, there’s a cogged rotor that lifts and drops the ramp. On really hot days, the casing swells just enough to bind the cog drive. Then I have to go in and free it up. The long-term solution is a better-machined housing. But we don’t get long-term solutions. We get me, on my hands and knees, dicking around with a greasy cog.

  With my head up the lander’s behind, I don’t think Mike or Stone saw me. Mike said something about fairness, about a deal being a deal. He had put in three summers at the Moon Walk, and by tradition, if not by rights, he was in line to be manager. It was never a formal thing, just something commonly understood: you pay your dues, you get ahead. That’s the way it’s always worked. Mostly.

  “Things change,” Stone said to him. “Leadership means flexibility.…”

  I squatted on my haunches, the rotor in my hand, wondering what would happen next. I could see the two of them square off through a portal in the lander—I’m sure Buzz Aldrin had a much better view. Mike squared his shoulders as manfully as he could while Stone let his belly speak for him—an occupier of considerable space that could not be easily moved. Would Mike storm out? Would Stone throw him out?

  In the end, Stone made the first move out the door, leaving Mike to mumble something about “what goes around, comes around.”

  Later, in the bathroom, while I was digging grease out from under my fingernails, Mike cornered me by the sinks and vented his frustration, bitching about his “three fucking years.” He appealed to the unspoken rules of boardwalk seniority that applied, he insisted, even to the boss’s kids. He spat into a sink. “Where the hell has she been for the last three years?”

  I rolled my head toward the open window and told him to lower his voice. The ticket office was just a few yards away. Stone’s daughter stood in the middle of it, in frame and design a completely different animal from her father: a grasslands fawn to his backwoods bear, with damp brown eyes and long blond hair like curtains around her head. She kept her hands fixed at her side, as if afraid anything she touched would break in her hands. We Waterses have been working for the Stones for years, live in the same town, go to the same schools, but I can’t say I know her from Adam. Or Eve.

  Mike played it tough, saying he didn’t give a shit if she could hear. But his voice was softer. He splashed water on his face, wiping it off with our brown, rough-and-ready paper towels. He said it wasn’t fair; he deserved better.

  I was right—I heard a cough, a polite clearing of the throat, a few yards away. I was sure she could hear everything.

  Don’t we all, I told him. Join the club.

  He made an ugly laugh. “That’s easy for you to say. You’re on the inside.”

  The inside? I didn’t like where he was going. Was he talking to me or sending a message to her? “The inside of what?” I asked him.

  Mike lifted his hands in the air as if balancing the world on his palms. “All of this,” he said. “The whole Sea Town thing.”

  What, because of my dad? Because I’m a Waters? “Funny thing,” I said, toweling off my hands, “I’m right here. Same as you.”

  “It’s not the same,” Mike said, leaving the bathroom. “Not even close.”

  chapter five

  green ribbon of freedom

  A dark blue uniform has a way of standing out in an amusement park, a stab of midnight in the thoughtless sparkles of fun. It was late in Rachel’s day shift, and there was no line at the booth; when she saw her approach, Rachel’s first thought was for her pockets. Anything incriminating in there? Any nail polish that might squeal, any perfumes that could rat? But the red cones where the pirate had been spirited away restored her good sense. This was probably about the Don’t fall graffiti. She rehearsed a description of the vandal in her head, his short stature, his mirrored aviator glasses. Justice, she thought with satisfaction, was about to arrive.

  The officer was of medium height, fit, with a slab of blond hair bound behind her and the permanent squint of someone who spent her life in the sun; without the uniform, she could have been a surf princess or one of the day-boat operators who ruled the bay piers as if they were old family estates. “Rachel Leary?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Rachel said, surprised to be addressed by name. But the police had probably been poking around, asking who might have seen something. You would expect that.

  But she did not expect a request to accompany the officer to the station.

  Involuntarily, Rachel looked up, for advice from people who were not there. “The station?”

  “We have a few questions.”

  “Don’t I need some kind of permission or a lawyer or something like that?”

  A thin smile. “It’s not like you’re under arrest or anything,” the officer said. “Your shift ends at five thirty, right?”

  Without meaning to, Rachel put her hands on her pockets, patting the reassuring nothing that was in there.

  * * *

  The police station was a sullen, eggshell-colored box as broad and flat as an open hand. Police cars and ambulances hived in its sunbaked lot; a couple of officers, furtive as schoolboys, smoked cigarettes around the corner from the front door. Rachel’s officer acknowledged them with a nod. Inside, she exchanged a few words with a colleague at the reception desk, a thick-faced man who, after registering Rachel’s presence with a lizard’s slow glance, showed no further interest in her. Beyond him, a handful of desks, loaded with outdated computers, were manned by officers in short-sleeved blue uniforms.

  “Come with me,” Rachel’s cop said, leading her between the desks to a glass door striped with blinds at the back of the office. It opened into a small, dim room with one long table and two people, a man and a woman in civilian clothes, who clipped their conversation short when Rachel entered and dismissed Rachel’s officer—she had come to think of her as her own—with a curt thank-you.

  “Miss,” the woman said, waving her to a chair, “we hope you can help us by answering a few questions.” The badge on her blouse simply said, CLEMMONS. Her mule-brown hair was cut mil
itary short, and she had a small mole above her lip that, on a prettier woman, might have been attractive. Betty, Rachel thought, would know what to do with this woman. Rachel almost felt sorry for her. “Detective Ryan and I just need a little more information before we can officially close our case,” Clemmons said.

  Detective Ryan nodded in sympathy with his colleague’s statement, his hands clasped together over a yellow legal pad. He had a scrubby black mustache and heavy jowls that gave his face a look of perpetual falling, as if life and gravity had collaborated to drag his face down. His eyes, wet and red, seemed irritated by allergies or exhaustion; they rested on Rachel without energy or focus. A ballpoint pen, tucked between his intertwined fingers, aimed at Rachel’s heart. “This shouldn’t have to take long,” he said with some exasperation, hinting that it was out of his hands. No, if it were up to him, this unpleasant business would be over fast. But it wasn’t up to him, he wanted her to know. When he lifted his elbow from the manila folder under his arm, Rachel could read the neatly printed label: LEARY, CURTIS.

  “This is isn’t about the graffiti?” Rachel asked.

  “You can clarify a few things,” Ryan said, splaying the file open. “I hope you can help us. That you’ll speak freely.”

  Detective Clemmons smiled wanly at Rachel, as if to say, Yes, you can. You have what it takes. Help us, won’t you? Rachel couldn’t find it within herself to smile back. Wasn’t Curtis’s case already closed? What was left to say that hadn’t been said before? She felt a cool breeze on the back of her neck. A faded green ribbon, filthy with dust, fluttered from the grill of an air vent. Why do they tie ribbons to vents? Rachel wondered. Do people really feel cooler when they can see the air is blowing? “This is about the accident?” she asked, the question catching in her throat.

  “We’re just straightening out some details,” Ryan said.

  “Like I explained in the hospital,” Rachel said, “I didn’t actually see … what happened.” In her first interview, just hours after the accident, Rachel had spat out fragments of answers between sobs, between spasms in her chest, her muscles heaving as if abandoning her bones. Out of mercy, officers sat sandwiched at her sides to steady her. In the hospital, Rachel remembered, the air was meat-locker cold.