by CJ Hauser
“So you all know we got fined,” Carter starts.
People groan. “Fucking bullshit,” someone says.
“We have the right to demonstrate,” Billy Deep says.
Carter says, “They say we were trespassing on private property. And we were.” He glances around the circle. “All of you have got to realize that there are going to be real consequences to our actions here. If there weren’t, it would mean we weren’t doing the right sort of things.”
Rosie’s ready to bust a seam she’s so excited. Real is just how she wants it.
Carter pulls a folded paper from his pocket. “This is our list of fines,” he says, and reads from the list: “ ‘Carter Marks, two hundred dollars. Jethro Newkirk, two hundred dollars . . .’ ”
“Good luck to them getting that out of me,” Jethro says. Jethro received a large check from the Dorians to cover the damage to his truck, but refused to cash it. He made a big show of it at the Uncle the other night, standing on his stool and burning the check with a lighter while a bunch of other guys clapped and yelled.
“ ‘Sara Riley, two hundred dollars. Billy and Joseph Deep, two hundred dollars each.’ ”
“Billy’s a minor,” Joseph says. “Do they really have the right to fine him?”
“It won’t go on any record,” Carter says, “but you get fined as his guardian.” Billy looks green in the face.
The list goes on and on. White, Keneally, Foehr, Robinson, Slane, Kraut, Gandossy, Birch, Palmer, Davis, Dickinson, Warner, Burritt, Sabia, Corti, Kenefick, Klufas, Sokolowski. The whole lot of those guys who were at the tracks. As their names are read off the guys from the docks sit farther forward, leaning over their hands.
“ ‘Cliff Frame, two hundred dollars. Rosalind Salem, two hundred dollars.’ ”
Everyone but me owes the stinking town. You can feel the air going out of people. Even Rosie is looking weary.
“And Leah Lynch,” Carter says. He looks around but of course Leah’s not there. Everyone is looking at their feet, kicking at the baby grass shoots. Carter slowly puts the list back in his pocket. “Here’s the thing,” he says. “You are not paying these fines.”
Everyone looks up.
“Wait a second, Carter,” Joseph says. “I’m sorry but I can’t just not pay it. If I get on bad standing with the town, I’ll have no chance of renewing my permits next year.”
Carter waves his hand. “The fines will get paid,” he says. “But we’re not going to pay them. We’ll raise the money.”
“How in the hell are we gonna raise that much money?” Jethro says.
Carter rubs his neck. He looks embarrassed. “Well,” he says, “I was thinking we’d have a show. A benefit concert.”
“Yes!” Rosie says.
All the guys are grinning now and nodding.
“Who’s playing?” asks Billy, slow as always. And everyone starts laughing.
“That guy right there,” Joseph says, pointing at Carter. “I’d bet you Mr. Marks knows a thing or two about how to put on a show.”
Billy turns red and everyone claps him on the back and then they all start clapping Carter on the back. Carter looks sheepish and pleased.
Jethro shakes his head. “A concert’s not going to fix anything,” he says. “We have to do something else. So our fines get paid. That’s not going to stop them from bulldozing the park. It’s not going to stop the town from letting a dozen more houses like that go up till there isn’t a scrap of waterfront left that isn’t some asshole’s backyard.”
The guys all look at Carter. He lays a hand on Jethro’s shoulder and says, “One step at a time, huh, Jethro?”
Everyone goes back to talking, speculating about the concert. To be honest, I’ve always wanted to see Carter play a show, ever since I was little. Even when I was hating him, I searched for footage of his gigs. I bought every live recording. I lay on the floor of my bedroom with the door locked, listening to live albums with my eyes closed, pretending I was there, imagining all the details and clapping along when the audience did. What are you up to in there? Marta would ask through the door. Nothing, I would say. Definitely nothing.
Marta says they met in a restaurant. She was there with some girls she knew from art school, pottery class. Carter came over and asked her out and she said she thought he was good-looking but seemed down on his luck. Raggedy, and definitely not a student. He looked like trouble, she said. But she said yes because Marta went after trouble always.
He came to pick her up at the dorms that Friday, showed up in denim. She and her roommates watched him from their window as he strode across the parking lot. He was carrying a melon-sized rock in his hand. Marta went down to meet him. He was standing there in the doorway, hefting the rock between his hands. So where are we going? she said. He said, The parking lot. I got this for you.
Marta said it was one heavy rock. It’s a geode, he said. It’s got crystals inside. Marta carried the rock in both hands and followed him. He got a hammer from the trunk of a car she was not impressed by. Put it down right there, he said. Now take this and hit it right where there’s that white spot. Marta looked at the hammer he was holding. What color are the crystals inside? she said. And Carter said he didn’t know, there was no way of knowing until you opened it. They could be silvery or brown or blue or purple. She pointed to his hammer. You swing it, she said. And I sure hope those crystals aren’t mud brown.
Marta stood there with her arms crossed as Carter crouched down. He took a big round-armed swing at the rock. He swung the hammer three times before it cracked open in two uneven halves on the asphalt. Inside, the walls of the geode were a deep amethyst purple. Well, that is nice, Marta said. She brushed some of the stone dust from his hair and let him take her out to a bar in a part of town she would never have gone to with anyone else.
When he brought her home later they paused in the parking lot, thinking about kissing. They heard giggling. Geode man! her roommates called from the window, swooning and giggling. Come back and bring me a rock, geode man!
That was the story. Sometimes I wonder, if that geode had been mud brown inside whether I would have made it into this world at all.
27
Leah
I wake up with the a/c thrumming loud and a scratchy motel comforter pulled over my head. I can hear someone’s kids, happy and screeching in the parking lot outside. I get up and open the blinds. The kids are chasing each other around the motel sign. The pink neon is faintly flashing:
VACANT. VACANT. VACANT.
Last night a girl named Bethany checked me in under the name Leah Loon. I’m supposed to check out at eleven.
Things look misty and a little green out the window. If I went home, returned to Henry on an almost-spring morning, we might be able to go back to what it was like before. He could pretend I’d never heard him say those things or seen him hit Billy and I could pretend to be a good wife who didn’t abandon her husband when he needed her or wrote articles that hurt his job.
I am good at many things, really, I am.
I get back in bed, pull the covers up, and turn on the television.
I try to focus on the nature show, flickering on the screen, but then I start thinking about Henry at home and how he is probably pretty upset. And I don’t want him to be upset, but I need a little time. Time to understand who Henry actually is. Because who was that person at the tracks who said such terrible things and threw such beautiful punches? Could that possibly have been Henry?
I have a sneaking terrible feeling that all these surprises are actually just glimpses of Henry’s Henryness. That these are things I might have learned about him before we got married if we had not done things so quickly. And back at the house, he may be thinking the same thing about me. I can’t bear to go home and find Henry, looking at me, head cocked, disbelieving, thinking: Who are you?
I flip through channels, looking for anything that will hold my attention.
Because if this new Henry is the real one, then I’
ll have to say good-bye to my Henry and all the old ways I thought about him. I’m not ready to do this. I love my Henry, after all. I married my Henry. This new, real person? He’s an interloper.
I turn off the television and open the drawer next to the bed. The Twilite Motel has room service. I’m about to order some eggs, bacon, juice, when I see they have a drink menu. I can order room-service beer. I can even order room-service cocktails! I order my small feast plus a Bloody Mary. The omelet full of cheddar and apples is good but the Bloody Mary full of horseradish and gin is even better. I phone up Bethany and I order another.
Two Henrys is too much, this room is thirty bucks a night, and Bethany has my credit-card number on file.
I have always wanted to go on a bender.
28
Quinn
It’s been three days and no one has seen Leah. Especially not Henry, who’s sitting at her desk right now ticking off all the places she’s not. Namely: here, the bar, and my place. She could only be, he keeps on saying. She could only be.
But what the fuck does that mean? She could only be. She’s almost six feet tall and capable of taking down dictation at fifty words a minute. She can hold a half bottle of whiskey and still drive a station wagon. You never know what she’s going to do until she does it, so why the hell does this guy, married to her for life, think she could only be in one of three places?
I almost feel bad for him. In the past days signs have been springing up in front of Henry’s house, Leah’s house, like mushrooms. Big poster boards on stakes that say things like SAVE NEVERSINK PARK! and DON’T KILL THE CAROUSEL! and DON’T FENCE ME OUT!
Office. Bar. Quinn’s. Henry keeps ticking these three places off like he’s the fucking Rain Man. He’s poking through Leah’s papers, looking for clues.
“When I was a kid,” Henry says, “my father would bring us here after taking us out on the boat. My grandfather was editor.” Charley comes out of her office, where she’s been on the phone calling around to see where Leah might be. She hands Henry a frame she’s taken off her office wall. It’s an article from the eighties with a picture of her (so small!) and Henry (even smaller!) holding this long fish in their two sets of hands. The lead says, THE BLUES ARE RUNNING! The caption: Pictured above, Charley and Hank Lynch Jr. with their first catch of the season.
I point to the picture of Charley. “Such a cute kid. Can you believe that’s you?”
“Of course I can, Winters, what sort of dumb-ass question is that?”
“Anything?” Henry says.
Charley says no, and lays a hand on his shoulder. “No one’s seen her, Hen.”
“Maybe she’s in New York,” I say. “I mean, doesn’t she have parents and all?”
“I doubt it,” Henry says, “but I’ll call them later.” He holds his head in his hands.
I get that. Who wants to say, Hey, your daughter who I married seems to be missing and do you have any idea where I could find her?
“Just try not to worry so much. I’m sure she’s fine,” Charley says. She clears her throat with a nicotine rattle. “Maybe she just needed some space.”
Needed some space? I give Charley the fisheye. I’ve never heard such tenderhearted bullshit out of her before. Something is up.
“What were you doing there anyway?” Henry says to me.
“The park protest?” I shrug. “Covering a story. Went on an anonymous tip-off.”
“A tip-off,” Henry repeats. “You mean Rosie. You should tell Carter he’ll never change anything if his front line is full of high school space cadets.”
“Hen,” Charley says.
“Are you talking about Rosie?” I say, and I’m on my feet. “You kiss those rich clowns’ asses for a paycheck while they build a mansion on Rosie’s childhood home and you make fun of her for doing something about it?”
Henry shakes his head. “What do you know about any of this?”
“I’ve been living here for almost a year now and my—”
“Exactly,” Henry says. “You’re a fucking flatlander, and if you knew a thing about this town, you’d know houses like these are the only way to get people around here decent jobs. It might,” he says to Charley, “even make it so you don’t have to freeze your ass off on a boat every day of your life just to take care of your family.”
Charley shakes her head. “When you tear down one thing so you can build another, you change a place. You make it new, so it’s not ours anymore. Sure, it’s only a little change, but if Elm Park does it, and the Dorians do it, and you help them . . . I’m saying, all the little pieces of home you’re giving away, they start to add up. And then someday, we’ll look around and think, Whose town is this? None of it will be ours anymore.” Charley pauses. “Hen, you’ve got to stop. I know it’s a good job, but you’ve got to stop.”
Henry sits there looking at his hands for a while. Then he stands up. “I’m going to find Leah,” he says. “I don’t know how you can just sit around like this.” He gets up and slams out the office door.
Charley watches the hinges settle and then thumps the desk with her hand. “He always fucking leaves in the middle!” she says. “Even when we were kids he did that. Left in the middle of the fight before he ran out of things to say.” She picks up a cigarette from her pack and lights it. Mouth full of Marlboro, she says, “I never run out of things to say, and he knows it.”
“Give me one of those,” I say.
“You quit,” Charley says. “I hate mooching quitters.”
“Just one,” I say. “Just one for a lonesome flatlander?”
She snorts, and hands me one. I knock on the glass of the framed article. “You fished?” I say. “I can’t imagine you fishing.”
“Bring me a bluefish and I’ll clean it for you faster than any Deep,” Charley says.
“Is that a rivalry dating back to the days of the ‘lobster wars’?” I say.
“You sound like a flatlander when you talk like that,” Charley says. She stubs out her cigarette, looks at the pack, tosses it to me.
“Take these with you,” she says. “It might help.”
“Help with what?” I say.
“Leah’s at the Twilite Motel,” Charley says. “The woman at the desk said a tall lady named Loon checked in two days ago.”
WHAT A DUMP. The Twilite Motel’s neon sign is on in the daylight and it hurts to look at it. Rosie has left her yellow plastic sunglasses in the cup holder. I put them on and everything looks a little less April-bright and ugly.
I head for the squat hovel labeled OFFICE. There’s a stocky blond girl in a motel-logo shirt leaning on the counter at the desk. The collar of her shirt is half flipped up and there’s a stain on her sleeve. She is drinking a Diet Coke and reading an enormous book. She looks up. She has dark circles under her eyes.
“What are you reading?” I ask.
She flips the pages so they run through her fingers, like it could be anything. “Anna Karenina,” she says. “It’s pretty good.”
There are just too many girls to love in this world. “Do you know where I might find a guest of yours, a tall lady with dark hair?” I say.
“Miss Loon? You’ll find her poolside,” she says.
Outside I round the parking lot, pass the motel rooms, and then I see a concrete square surrounded by a chain-link fence. Here is the in-ground pool, absolutely green and surrounded by an optimistic number of chaise longues.
In one of them is Leah. She is dressed in the same muddy jeans I saw her in last as well as an enormous brick-red sweatshirt that says DOWN EAST on it. She has the hood up and is wearing a pair of large black sunglasses, the price tag still dangling from one of the arms. In her hands she’s holding a copy of the Boothbay Register, which she seems to be reading, or at least flipping through. In her lap is a box of taffy and on the ground is a quarter-empty bottle of White Horse whiskey.
Apparently the Twilite Motel has a gift shop.
“Hey, Loon!” I shout. Leah looks up at me. She do
esn’t seem pleased. She goes back to reading the paper. I open the fence gate and take a chaise next to her. I push up my sunglasses. I’m wearing my mother’s old Irish sweater and I pull my hands into the arms and hold the openings shut. I wiggle down into the chaise and still it’s not comfortable at all. “Are you having a breakdown?” I say. “Or just a bender?”
“Do you know that this establishment does not offer the Menamon Star? I gave them a piece of my mind, let me tell you.” She flips the page again. Either she’s not really reading or booze counts as a performance-enhancing drug for journalists. “So I got the Register instead, and now I’m thinking I’ll have to go apologize. Because this paper is vastly better than ours. Look at this, they have a world news section. Boothbay is reporting on the economy in China, for Christ sake.”
“But you don’t want to write about stuff like that anyway, do you?” I say.
“I don’t want to write about anything at all,” Leah says. “I quit. My notebook I bequeath to you.”
“Please don’t start bequeathing anything just yet,” I say. “It’s premature and fucking creepy.”
Leah finishes what’s in her glass of whiskey. “You’re right,” she says. “Let’s just say I’m on vacation.”
A car drives by the motel and the chain-link fence around the pool rattles. The concrete is bumpy and stained in spots and the chaises are yellowing and brittle. The bare branches of the trees all around us wave back and forth as a wind blows hard; leaves from the parking lot blow through the fence. They land on the surface of the pool, which, despite its color, still smells of chlorine.
“This is some pleasure spot,” I say. “When are you coming back?”
“Oh, I don’t think I will,” Leah says.
“I think you’re out of vacation days.”
“Has Henry been by the office?”
