Surface Tension

by Christine Kling

  I closed my eyes and surrendered my consciousness to the world of sensation. Explosions of color lit up my inner eyelids. But before long, my memory kicked in and a montage of memories played in my mind without plot or destination, the way dreams sometimes jump from image to image with no discernible connection.

  Pit and I played dress-up next to the family’s Dodge Valiant, getting into Red’s navy footlocker, trying on his uniforms, the big brass latches on the locker gleaming in the late afternoon light, the garage filled with the odor of old motor oil and mothballs.

  Standing in front of an easel, my mother’s arms wrapped around me from behind, her warm bosom pressed against my back. She was steadying my right hand and the brush it held, whispering in my ear “Light strokes, yes, that’s it, lovely,” as I washed in the blue sky around the white clouds.

  All five of us were on board Gorda, probably the one and only time it ever happened. It was the Fourth of July and we were offshore waiting for the fireworks on the city barge. It was a night so dark and still, the sea looked like star-splattered black glass. Meanwhile, Maddy, the only one allowed to use the lighter lit Pit’s and my sparklers ever so slowly, and we were screaming at him to hurry up, to stop trying to be such a big shot. Red told us all to shut up. Mother went up to stand alone on the bow. He didn’t go after her.

  We were in the living room and Red was crying. I’d never seen my father cry. I hadn’t said a word to anybody all day. Not to the lifeguards. Not to the police officers. Not to my brothers. Not to my father. “Didn’t she say anything?” he kept asking. “I don’t understand. Why? Why did she do this? She must have said something.” I didn’t think I would ever talk again. . . .

  The summer burned up through my towel, sandwiching me between rays of the sun and the dry oven heat of the sand. On a radio, several blankets over Carole King was singing “Up on the Roof.” I was pretending to read the words of my book.

  “Seychelle,” my mother said.

  I didn’t answer her. I kept my eyes moving over the print on the page.

  “Honey.” I was still mad. I wanted to be back with Pit and Molly. “Try to understand. Sometimes it’s just too hard to do what we know is right.

  “Seychelle, will you ever forgive me?”

  I answered her.

  She stood up and walked down to the water.

  "Did you fall asleep?”

  B.J.’s voice brought me back. The pain was nearly gone. I felt rested and renewed.

  I sat up, shifting the towel around me, and rotated my arm and shoulder. There was a little remnant, sort of a phantom pain, but I had regained 90 percent of the movement in my wrist and shoulder.

  “That’s amazing, B.J. What did you do?”

  “Just a little shiatsu. It’s like acupuncture, only using massage instead of needles.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, trying to stand gracefully without losing the towel. “Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “What are friends for?”

  I walked closer to him and watched his eyes. “You are my friend, aren’t you? I mean, after what happened the other night at your house ... I don’t know, I was kinda crazy.”

  “Always, Seychelle.”

  He was right. I could see it in there.

  “You wouldn’t believe what I had started thinking about you. People have been following me, spying on me, trying to hurt me, and I haven’t known who to trust.”

  “Trust your own instincts,” he said, and wrapped his arms around me.

  My own arms were crossed in front of my chest, clutching the towel, and I folded into his embrace feeling slight and fragile in the circle of his arms. It was rare and remarkably pleasant for me to feel almost petite. I nuzzled my face into his chest, smelling him and feeling the thudding of my pulse deep in my tight throat. I wanted to say something, to explain that I’d never felt anything like his touch, but the words wouldn’t come. I pressed my body to his and was about to toss my towel and reach around those shoulders when he placed his hands on my arms and gently pushed me away.

  Our eyes locked. He brushed the backs of his fingers across my cheek. Smiling, I playfully bit his pinky.

  B.J. pushed out his lower lip in a playful pout and shook his head. “Seychelle.”

  I loved the sound of his voice speaking my name. “How do you do that? I was in so much pain, and you just made it all go away.”

  “No.” He sighed. “Not all of it.” He pressed his fingers against the tendons on the side of my neck, and I winced. “See that tightness? You are still holding on to something, something I can’t massage away. I don’t know what it is . . . maybe you don’t even know what it is. But until then”—he turned me around—“this is not the time,” and he pushed me through the bedroom door. He didn’t follow.

  After kicking the door closed, I flopped facedown on my bed, grabbed a pillow, pulled it tight over the back of my head, and screamed into the mattress. Pain? Yeah, I knew pain—the pain of rejection. The fabric around my face grew wet with spit. I didn’t care.

  When I finally got up, I took a few deep breaths and looked around my room. It was a mess, like my life. Why, oh why was I coming on to B.J. like this? I was behaving like an idiot. I sorted through several piles of wrinkled clothing before finally settling on a pair of jeans and a plain green T-shirt. When I walked out into the living room, still combing the snarls out of my hair B.J. was sitting on the couch drinking a glass of orange juice.

  His smiling eyes watched me cross the room. “Jeannie called me,” he said. “She was worried about you—sent me over here to find you. I guess she’s been leaving messages on your machine and trying to reach you for almost twenty-four hours.”

  I glanced at the machine. The red light was blinking.

  “Did she say what she wanted?”

  “Just that she’s pinned down the owner of the Top Ten. She said she needs to talk to you about it.”

  I dialed Jeannie’s number but just got her answering machine again. I left a brief message so she’d know I was alive, and told her I’d call back later.

  “Do you want to talk about what’s going on?” B.J. asked.

  I opened the fridge and searched fruitlessly for something edible. I reached for the orange juice and got a glass for company’s sake.

  Flopping down into my mamasan chair and tucking my feet under me, I considered how much to tell him. Not that I didn’t trust B.J., but I didn’t want to get him worried—or more worried.

  “As near as I can tell, Neal was after something when he went out there on the Top Ten. He was diving for something on the bottom. Remember those two guys I told you had hassled me and Elysia?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yesterday, after I got back from the memorial service, I took the Whaler and went back out to try to find the same spot where I found the Top Ten, and those two guys were diving out there. They were checking out some artificial reef wrecks. Neal knew where it was— whatever it is—so that’s why they were trying to find Neal the night they jumped us. I have no idea what Elysia had to do with it, but I’m sure her death is connected.

  “So, anyway, last night I went aboard the Top Ten and got the last position out of the GPS. And it seems at least one of those guys had the same idea. While I was poking around the boat, I noticed something weird on the afterdeck. It was this big compressor. Maybe Neal was planning on using it as a hookah rig so he could stay down longer than he could on a tank. But I don’t know how deep you can go on a rig like that.”

  “Me neither.”

  “I thought maybe I would go over to Pier 66 and ask some questions, see if Neal had talked to anybody about it when he brought it aboard.”

  “I think you need to leave things alone, Seychelle. Let the police deal with this.”

  “Yeah, right. They wouldn’t even know the right questions to ask—that is, if they were even interested in asking them.” I punched the button on my answering machine to see if anyone had left messages besides Jeannie. As the third message s
tarted to play, I recognized Detective Collazo’s voice.

  “Miss Sullivan, I need to speak to you. It concerns the Daggett girl. Please call me or beep me immediately.” The robot voice on the machine told me that his message had been recorded at eight-thirty in the morning. Neither B.J. nor I said anything for several long seconds. I just sat on my stool rubbing my hand across my lips and chin, staring at the machine.

  B.J. was the first to break the silence. “Are you going to call him?”

  “I don’t trust him, B.J. I think he’s just using Ely’s name to make me call. There were cops on the Top Ten when I came back by it this morning.”

  “The police are not the bad guys, Seychelle.”

  “They think I killed Neal and Patty. Pete says Collazo’s been poking around the Downtowner asking about me. He’s not even looking for other suspects. What’s he

  going to think when they figure out it was me on the Top Ten last night?”

  “You want me to drive you over to Jeannie’s? She’ll know what to do.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not home, remember?”

  “We’ll wait for her.”

  “B.J., these guys scare me, but jail scares me even more. This guy Collazo, he’s just too focused on me. I didn’t do anything, but I’ve watched enough segments of 60 Minutes to know that innocent people do go to jail for crimes they didn’t commit—and it’s usually because of some pit bull type of cop who just won’t let go and makes the evidence fit the perp he wants it to fit. Naw, I’ve got to do this other thing first. I need to find out what the story is on that compressor on the boat. If I can figure out what Neal was doing out there that morning, then okay, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable talking to the cops. But not till then.”

  He shook his head but smiled. “You are one stubborn, hardheaded woman.”

  I grabbed my shoulder bag off the bar and rummaged around for the keys to Lightnin’. “I’ll be fine.” I lifted my arm and rotated my wrist. The pain was barely noticeable. “Thanks for everything, B.J.”

  “Okay. But I’m going to be working around here the rest of the day. I’ll be inside the big house. If you need me, I’ll be here.”

  XVIII

  The Top Ten used to berth on B Pier, in Slip B37. It was third in from the end, so I walked out the length of the pier. Most of the bigger boats had changed since the days I used to visit Neal there. These megayachts usually stayed on the move in order to remain one step ahead of the tax man. Their transoms bore hailing ports such as George Town, Cayman Islands; Road Harbor B.V.I.; or Hamilton, Bermuda—all exotic ports with little in the way of industry for their people, so providing tax-dodge hailing ports kept the millionaires in town for a few days out of the year.

  My Way was in her slip, but the boat was all locked up. I didn’t see Nestor around. The docks looked deserted. I thought I would at least find Raymond out here working on the deck of one of the big yachts. Raymond was from down island. He had come up to the states from the Caribbean as a crewman on board a big classic wood charter yacht and then had some kind of falling-out with the skipper in Lauderdale. That was about four years ago, and he had supposedly been working to make his fare home to Bequia ever since. He worked illegally, on a cash-only basis, but he could lay down a coat of varnish that looked like glass. His skin was nearly as black as the Ray-Ban shades he always wore, and his dreads were shoulder length. He always looked like he was just loafing around, but he got more work done than three average men, and the skippers fought to hire him. He rarely spoke, but he was always listening.

  “Seychelle, ova hea.” The voice came from the foredeck of a hundred-foot-plus British flagged schooner.

  I walked a bit out the finger pier. Under the low blue foredeck awning, Nestor and Raymond sat grinning and passing a joint back and forth.

  “Come join the party, Seychelle,” Nestor said.

  I grabbed the wire lifelines and climbed onto the high deck of the schooner. She was an old-timer dating back to the twenties, but she was in immaculate condition. I remembered her from a few years back when Red towed her up the New River. The captain was a British gentleman who had invited me below for a tour. She looked like she had been under Raymond’s care for several weeks. Her brightwork shone like blown glass.

  Up on the foredeck, I ducked under the awning and joined the two guys. Nestor was wearing the usual hired captain’s uniform—blue cargo shorts, Top-Siders, and a white polo shirt with the name of his boat, My Way, embroidered over the breast pocket.

  I perched on the edge of a skylight hatch. “I wanted to ask you guys a couple of questions.”

  “You okay?” Raymond asked when he saw my cuts and bruises up close.

  “Yeah, it was nothing. A long story.”

  “You like some ganja, mon?” Nestor offered me the joint. His fake accent was pathetic, and he looked pretty stoned. As a third-generation Cuban American, there was very little Caribbean left in him.

  “No, thanks.”

  “What can we do for you, lady?” Raymond smiled his shy, uneven grin. The man could smoke dope all day and never get the least messed up. I’d seen him do it on the Top Ten.

  “I’m trying to figure out what Neal was doing out there last Thursday. Did he say anything to anybody about what he was taking the boat out for?”

  “Naw,” Nestor said. Raymond shook his head.

  “Okay. Did you ever notice Neal loading a compressor onto the afterdeck of the boat?”

  “Yeah.” Raymond nodded, his dreads bouncing. “He axed me to help him wit it.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nestor said, “I remember that day.”

  “Did he say what he wanted to use it for?”

  “Yeah,” Nestor said, taking a deep drag and holding the smoke in his lungs. I waited for him to finish. And waited.

  He exhaled with a whoosh. “He said he was going to do a little diving out on a reef offshore, shoot some grouper maybe some summer crab.” Neal had always been guilty of taking lobster out of season. I could almost hear him bragging about it to Nestor.

  “But why would he need another compressor? The Top Ten’s already got one below for filling tanks. Neal was always a tank diver.”

  Nestor shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes stayed on the joint. “He just said he wanted to try diving with a hookah rig once. It was the boss’s money, he said. You know, he might as well experiment.”

  A hookah rig was one where the diver was connected by a long hose to a compressor on the surface. Usually, though, they used small compressors that had been fitted inside a flotation device so that the compressor followed them around on the surface. I couldn’t imagine any reason why Neal would try out a hookah rig.

  “Why, looky who’s here,” Perry Greene called out as he walked down the finger pier and prepared to climb aboard the schooner. “If it ain’t Miss Sullivan herself. Whooee, sure looks like somebody beat the crap outta you.”

  “Hey, Perry, leave her alone,” Nestor said. “What’s up?”

  Perry’s white-blond hair hung in his eyes as he ducked under the awning and dropped his butt onto the teak decks. The hair did not conceal the open greed in his eyes as he watched the two men smoke, nor did his cutoffs conceal much of anything, the way he was sitting on the deck. I turned my head aside in disgust.

  “Hey, you guys wanna pass me a little of that?” He reached for the joint and sucked in smoke hungrily.

  Raymond looked at me for several seconds before turning to Perry. “The captain is not hea.”

  Perry exhaled loudly. “Shit, and here I thought we’d get some business done. Got some paperwork to take care of.” He grinned at me, waiting for me to ask.

  I couldn’t believe it. He had to be talking about a job. They were headed upriver with the schooner for a haul-out, and they were going to be hiring Perry to help them make the trip? I caught Raymond’s eye, and he nodded at me, confirming it.

  “So the Brit’s hiring you, is he?”

  “Yes sirree, boy. What, they didn’t
ask you, Seychelle? Now, what the hell do you make of that, huh?” He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Looks like nobody wants to hire a bitch to do a man’s job.”

  “Perry,” Nestor said, “why don’t you just shut up? Even if having balls was all it took to be a good captain, you’d still have trouble meeting the criteria.”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  “I tink he say it already, mon,” Raymond said, laughing. “Da captain be back later. You come back.”

  Perry stood. “Don’t matter what you say, the word is out on Sullivan Towing.” He climbed down to the dock. “Seychelle, honey, you’re gonna be able to sit home and eat bonbons and watch the soaps every day.” He laughed his high-pitched hillbilly cackle, turned, and walked up the dock.

  Nobody said anything for several minutes as the two men quietly smoked. Finally Nestor tossed the last of the joint overboard, and it sizzled as it hit the water. Neither man would look at me.

  “It must be pretty bad, what they’re saying about me,” I finally ventured.

  “Seychelle, I haven’t believed it, especially not now that I see you and talk to you. People are saying you’ve had some kind of a nervous breakdown, that you’re acting erratic, that you can’t be trusted. It’ll pass. You know how rumors fly around the docks.”

  “But you also know what it’s like to have boat payments to make. Nestor I can’t sit around and wait for my reputation to clear. It’s all tied to this Top Ten business, I know it is. Is there anything else you guys can think of that was weird about Neal or the boat that day?”

  “Well, there is one thing. The only other guy living on board the Top Ten was the engineer, Matt. You knew him, didn’t you, Sey?”

  “Yeah, he came on board just before Neal and I split up.”

  “Well, he told the cops that Neal had given him the day off, but he told me that morning, right after the Top Ten left the dock, that Neal had just fired him. Said he wouldn’t be needing him anymore. You know as well as I do that you couldn’t find a better engineer.”