The Jetty

by Jay Brandon

  As he approached the handsome car, it struck him that the Mercedes and the Subaru were as marked a contrast as he and Kathy – Kathy, with her classic elegance, and Michael with his slightly shopworn nerdiness. The Mercedes was of the SSK class, manufactured in the 1920’s. It was

  probably worth a hundred grand – not really the kind of car that should be exposed to the corrosive ocean air. Michael leaned over to peer reverently into the rich leathery sanctuary. In fact, Michael found more comfort in things than in people. People puzzled him. He liked people generally, but he did not understand them, and his lack of understanding kept him at a distance. On the other hand, mechanical things, be they computers or automobiles, made him feel comfortable, accomplished even.

  “Pretty, huh?” suggested a female voice behind him. He saw her image partly reflected in the Mercedes window, and turned to face a lovely blonde woman in a light blue satin blouse with her top buttons undone.

  “Very,” he said.

  “Care for a closer look?”

  “Absolutely,” he replied almost automatically, perhaps letting his glance linger less than automatically over her cleavage. Those undone buttons seemed to demand a stare.

  She moved closer to him, whispering, “I meant the car.”

  He laughed nervously.

  “Vivian,” she said, holding out her hand. “Michael,” he said, taking her hand in his.

  Vivian walked around the front of the Mercedes and popped the hood, so Michael could have a look.

  “Vivian!” called a young man’s voice. The owner of the Mercedes looked up hearing her name. Michael followed her gaze. The voice belonged to a figure more boy than man sitting astride a motorbike near the Lonely Gull sign. He was neatly dressed in a beige cotton jacket and pressed dungarees. He had a wan, aristocratic appearance. He seemed agitated, but Vivian dismissively waved him off.

  Michael was studying with delight the shining artistry of the Mercedes’ cylinders. “I’ve never seen one of these except in books. Daimler started making the SS and SSK in 1925. Is this a ’26 or ’27?”

  “It’s not polite to ask a girl’s age,” Vivian remonstrated jokingly. She

  had the look of a fashion model and the breezy carelessness of a cocktail

  waitress.

  “Check out the driver’s seat,” she said.

  He didn’t argue. He got in the driver’s seat and was surprised when she climbed into the passenger side. “This is just like a date,” she said, patting him on the knee. “We’re practically going steady.”

  There was a knock on the window. The young man in the beige cotton jacket was rapping on the glass. “Vivian!” he said, “I must talk to you.”

  “Poor Antonio,” Vivian said to herself, rolling her eyes, but she climbed out of the car and followed the boy to his motorbike.

  Michael absentmindedly opened the Mercedes’ glove compartment, reached inside and felt something cold and metallic. He pulled it out and to his surprise found himself holding a revolver!

  He had never handled a pistol before; it was not an unpleasant feeling. He balanced it in his hand. There was danger there, and power as well. Still he wondered, was it loaded? And who kept a revolver in his glove compartment?

  When Kathy emerged from the café, she saw Michael and the antique car. Rather than return to the Subaru, Kathy walked to the back of the lot and watched the solitary dolphin still swimming in the canal.

  “It seems sad, the dolphin,” said a voice, with a deep, mellifluous tone. She looked toward the voice – at first the sun was in her eyes and the face was difficult to make out – now it came clear. It was a handsome face, a calm face, beaming with confidence. And the eyes, especially bright, attentive – taking her all in. She felt for a moment that he knew what she was thinking. And seemingly without hesitation she was taking his hand.

  “Jack Leffler,” he volunteered.

  “Kathy,” she said, and found herself following him toward the railing edging the back of the parking lot. She considered her companion. He was tall, a powerful presence, and there was something – she couldn’t describe it – something out of the ordinary about him. Perhaps it was his clothes

  – they were a bit too perfect. He reminded her of a figure in a classic

  30’s or 40’s black and white Vogue photo shoot. He was wearing a cravat and a white long-sleeved linen shirt. He was aware that she was studying him, but he was anything but self-conscious. He seemed to be enjoying the attention, but something had caught his eye. “Look!” he said.

  When she looked, she saw the solitary dolphin had been joined by a second. The dolphins were both now leaping gracefully in the channel.

  “They live forever,” Jack said. “Well, practically forever.” She was taken with the beauty of the scene.

  “We’ve only just met,” he said, “and I don’t want to be forward, but you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”

  She reached up nervously and grabbed the open collar of her blouse,

  holding it tight.

  “You know there’s no shame in sadness,” he continued. ”There is a time, a place for every emotion.”

  She looked up. Their eyes met.

  At that moment, Michael approached the railing with Vivian close behind him, having apparently extracted herself from the young Antonio, who Michael noticed parked astride his motorbike across the street.

  “So here you are, Jack,” Vivian said. “Hello, dear. Vivian, this is Kathy.”

  “Oh yes,” Vivian replied, as if not to be outdone. “This is Michael. He and I are old friends.”

  “Staying on the island?” Jack inquired. “Well, just for a few days,” Michael said.

  “Then we must have cocktails?” Vivian insisted. “Jack makes a marvelous cocktail, don’t you, Jack?”

  “Absolutely,” Jack replied.

  They said their goodbyes without exchanging phone numbers or addresses. The Lefflers exited the lot first. As they began to drive away, Jack waved, and the high speed of the Mercedes gave off an almost ghostly scream.

  Michael looked at Kathy, raising his eyes at the oddness of the strangers’ abrupt appearance and now quick exit.

  “Be nice, Michael,” she said.

  Kathy found Michael’s handwritten directions in her purse and she read them off while he tried to find the streets, shading his eyes from the glare, both of them too absorbed in the hunt to notice the familiar landmarks: the one restaurant that had endured since their first visit; the cottages, some of them little more than shacks, where they’d stayed years ago, feeling very mature for being taken seriously and having keys and towels dispensed to them by bored desk clerks; the road to the beach they’d walked and run and bicycled down dozens of times. They turned away from all that on Eleventh Street, driving outward into a part of the island with which they were less familiar, though it too was studded with bits of their past, the condo complexes where they’d stayed when they were students. They were looking for a narrow road that turned left off Eleventh and meandered down toward the beach.

  “Sanders Street, right?” he asked.

  “Yes, Michael,” she said, still sounding impatient. “It’s the name of the people who own the house. Watch out.”

  The road took a sharp bend. Michael was only doing about twenty, but he still almost skidded off into the loose sand of the dunes that rose high enough around them to obscure any other view. “The Sanders must be hiding out from somebody,” he muttered.

  Around the bend the road began climbing. Sand tumbled across the road, almost obscuring it, but they rose above the level of the dunes until they could see the house, a perfect little beach cottage, ugly as driftwood, precious as a vacation relic.

  The cottage was made of never-painted wood, pitted and almost black from sea air weathering. On the side they approached it was raised

  on beams. Michael parked in the shade the house itself provided, while

  Kathy searched for the key.

  “Th
ey were supposed to leave it under the mat,” she said. Michael helped her search. No luck.

  “What should we do now?” he asked.

  “I could call the rental agent,” she said. “No, the cell phone coverage is out. We’ll have to go find their office in town.”

  “And we were just there!” Michael moaned.

  “Michael, it’s not that far to town.” Kathy emphasized her words as if to underscore her resolve. She was back on the island. She would not be annoyed by a minor inconvenience.

  They went back through town, learning the rental office address at the Family Center. They picked up the key (apologies from the agent), and were on their way back to the cottage when traffic came to a complete standstill.

  “What’s wrong now?” Michael said.

  A tall policeman in khakis was coming down the line of cars. He wore a white Stetson and moved in a deliberate, unhurried manner. A holstered handgun hung loosely from his belt. Michael was reminded of a Western marshal coming through the swinging doors of a saloon. The officer was an intimidating presence. He had unforgiving eyes, and a handlebar mustache reminiscent of Wyatt Earp. What’s with all these mustaches? Michael asked himself. He couldn’t even grow a mustache; he’d tried several times.

  “Good afternoon, officer,” Michael said, always exceedingly polite to

  people in authority.

  “Afternoon,” the officer replied, as if there was nothing ‘good’ about it. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding at Kathy.

  “What seems to be the trouble, Officer?”

  “Seems that somebody robbed the local bank. Driver’s license?” “Of course,” Michael said, starting to open the door to get out.

  “Stay in the car, Sir,” said the officer.

  Michael closed the door and sank a little deeper in to the slightly worn blue vinyl seats, digging in his pocket to produce his license. He’d watched a scene like this in a Bogart movie. A traffic stop just like this. Thoughts raced through his mind. An escaped convict? A murderer from the Most Wanted list?

  The policeman ignored Michael’s question, instead reading Michael’s license information. “Mr. Shaw, is it?”

  “That’s right,” Michael said. The officer handed back the license. “All right, then,” he said, stepping back and waving them on.

  As he passed by the bank, Michael glanced into the parking lot. A uniformed guard sat on the running board of an armored car, and a paramedic was attending to his head. There was an ambulance. Two other police cars were parked in the lot, their red lights flashing. He looked over at Kathy, but she apparently failed to notice the post-robbery tableau.

  The cottage’s spiral staircase made Michael’s progress with the suitcases slow and bumpy. At the top of the staircase was a small landing and the back door of the cottage. It opened into a little kitchen, not modern but completely furnished within eight square feet, including microwave and dishwasher.

  The house was hot and musty, but the mustiness was composed of different smells, smells other than the staleness that a closed house inland would hold. This air carried old salt and tar and bits of flesh that had decomposed inside shells. Michael found a thermostat and started the air cooling while Kathy walked on to the living room, past a small dining table and bamboo-legged furniture. There was a door at the far end. She opened the door onto the porch, and Michael returned to the car for another load.

  The house was built on a small rise, so the front of the house was level

  with the dunes, which fell gently from that point down to the beach two

  hundred yards away. There was a narrow porch with a wooden railing that creaked when Kathy leaned on it, but she leaned forward anyway, into the wind, into the sun that caressed her face. She began finally to be infiltrated by heat, by that bone-deep warmth that stayed inside her here at the beach no matter how many hours she spent inside air-conditioned rooms. Kathy let the warmth welcome her home. It didn’t feel like an external force, it felt like something coming alive inside her.

  “How is it?” a voice called from inside the cottage. It was Michael’s voice, sounding as changed as everything else. She heard him emerge behind her.

  They stood together for long minutes, staring at the spangles of sun in the waves, the small waves rolling in and in and in, dying on the beach but constantly renewed. There was water to the horizon and beyond, gray- green water that was a world of its own, a vaster world than the narrow strip of land on which they stood.

  “I feel like I’m still driving,” Michael said after a while, stretching his arms and shoulders. “Let’s hit the beach, how ‘bout?”

  Kathy hesitated. “You go ahead,” she said without turning around. “I want to get settled here first.” Michael looked disappointed, but he said, “Yeah, you’re right, I’ll get the rest of the stuff from the car. We can – ”

  “No, you go ahead, Michael. Really. “

  Michael looked at the back of her head, the set of her shoulders. There was nothing to be learned there. He made his voice sound cheerfully unconcerned. “All right. Whatever you say.”

  He was already wearing shorts and a purple Hawaiian shirt; he just exchanged his tennis shoes for flip-flops and was ready for the beach. “You’re sure?” he called, and she turned and waved from the porch.

  He had to trudge through the sand of the dunes, the flip-flops tossing sand up onto the backs of his legs. Their rented house was too small to have its own boardwalk, but there was one nearby, twenty or thirty yards away. Michael made for it, realizing it was the first time he’d walked so far through dunes. The sand undulated beneath him unreliably. The dunes were covered with grass that scraped his legs. Hadn’t the dunes once been pure white sand? But he assured himself that they could not have been; this scraggly grass couldn’t have spread so quickly. It was his memory that had deleted the grass, leaving the landscape pristine.

  Kathy watched Michael reach the boardwalk and clamber up onto it, watched him walk farther away until he was just another figure on the crowded beach. When she glanced away and then looked for him again, she couldn’t pick him out for the beach was filled with people, people on towels and lawn chairs, teenagers cruising in pickup trucks, calling to each other, chasing each other into the water. From a distance the scene was soundless, and that was nice. Kathy could hear the sound of the waves above all; nothing but the waves.

  She stood and watched for a long, listless time. The changing but familiar view seemed to erase all else from her mind. She wasn’t ready to go down and mingle yet, but she was beginning to feel one with the crowd, a tourist, a stranger.

  She went inside the cottage, her sun-blinded eyes making the cottage’s interior seem murky. She walked into the only bedroom, which was oriented so that one of its windows looked down toward the beach and the other offered a view of the small side yard, and beyond the yard, the dunes. Kathy opened her suitcase and found one of her bathing suits, one that she’d tossed into her suitcase without thinking. It was a one-piece model, especially modest compared to the ones currently popular. Kathy caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror of the dresser opposite the bed. So pale. More than a year’s worth of paleness. The air-conditioning certainly cooled the place down quickly, she thought, feeling a chill.

  Returning to the kitchen, she saw that Michael had brought up the groceries before he left. She knew he had made a special effort to remember

  to unload the car. When he remembered, he always did the polite things like opening doors and washing dishes. And he always worried. Kathy knew Michael worried about her, and she realized she had given him reason to. But while on the one hand, his worrying could be sweet and solicitous, it could also be stifling, oppressive, and annoying.

  Kathy’s desire to return to Port Aransas had surprised her – certainly in its persistence but more so by its intensity. Without question, she had her occasional highs. But they now occurred rarely, and ended with more than commensurate lows. Images of her once happier, livelier self were distant memorie
s, but how she longed to be that person again – to possess again a capacity for excitement and delight, to enjoy life’s little rituals; a conversation, dinner at a restaurant, cocktails with friends, or . . .

  Rituals of the beach – rituals that predated even Michael. Putting on her white bathing suit first thing, for example. Or checking the closets and storage areas in a new place. She explored the tiny kitchen cabinets and drawers. She opened the refrigerator and put away the groceries, except for a bag of limes. She found a cutting board and a short, sharp knife and began cutting the limes into quarters, then smaller into little juicy pyramids that she piled into a cereal bowl, part of a set of cheap plastic dishes in one of the cabinets.

  Suddenly Kathy looked up. Her hand gripped the knife. “Hello?” she wanted to say, but she didn’t want to interrupt the silence. That’s all there was, silence. She could feel the emptiness of the cottage around her, but for a moment the emptiness had been disturbed. Hadn’t it?

  She returned to her self-imposed task. For the most part she worked automatically, but once she noticed her hands. The last time she’d been here at the beach, her hands had been a girl’s hands. Now they were a woman’s hands, tendoned and competent, working briskly and almost independently of their owner.

  She cut and cut – compulsively, obsessively, even angrily. She didn’t know why. All she knew was that the cutting and slicing motions were distracting, comforting even. She held the lime and placed her left hand over the flat side of the knife, pushing down, “chop, chop,” the motion became more defined, more forceful, more rapid – faster, faster and then a clattering sound. The fruit had slipped, and the knife had come down on her left thumb. For a moment she felt only pain, then the blood began to flow. She grabbed a paper towel, but it was not enough for the task. Blood leaked out onto her bathing suit, and down her arm. She turned to the sink, running water over the cut, wrapping it again with paper towels, till the towels ran out, the towel roll having been low from the beginning. She made her way to the bathroom, where she found band aids in the cabinet, and finally got the wound covered, but not before her white swimsuit was well stained with blood.