Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

by Michael J. White

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Part - One

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Part - Two

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Part - Three

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  G . P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3,

  Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

  London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,

  New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale,

  North Shore 0632 , New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,

  Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2010 by Michael J. White

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any

  printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  White, Michael J., date.

  Weeping underwater looks a lot like laughter / Michael J. White.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16329-0

  1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Iowa—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.H5787W

  813’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  FOR NATE GEORGE, MY BROTHER AND YOURS, TOO

  Acknowledgments

  All my thanks to Denise Shannon, Kate Davis, Nanci McCloskey, and Koren Russell, for their faith; Jaime Manrique, Nicholas Christopher, Ben Marcus, Victoria Redel, Ben Taylor, and Jonathan Dee, for their kind wisdom and encouragement; Frank Tarsitano, for offering me incredible employment as I wrote; all my students, for their inspiration; all my family, for their love.

  Messy, isn’t it?

  —RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

  Part

  One

  One

  On our debut night in Des Moines, Nicholas Parsons murdered a high school senior in the hotel room directly beneath us. The following morning we received a call from the front desk receptionist announcing a cancellation of the complimentary breakfast buffet, due to the conversion of the hotel restaurant into a provisional police headquarters. All guests were to remain in their rooms until they were cleared for checkout by one of the FBI agents who were at that moment conducting brief inquiries room by room. Our inquiry came by phone three hours later, long after my dad had missed his first meeting as the new branch manager at Faith Harvest Insurance, around the time my mom began snapping bird’s-eye photos of the parking lot in the hopes of capturing killers disguised as crime-scene loiterers, and minutes after Zach leapt off the windowsill and yelled, “FUCK!” in response to injuriously pinching his hindquarters in the shifting vents of the air conditioner. My dad let the phone ring six or seven times. I’ll describe him as a kind man, but also a Vietnam War veteran built of two hundred fifty pounds of flexible girth with a voice that sounds as if it originated from an even bigger man who lived in harsh conditions among harsh women.

  “This is Leon Flynn, room five-seventeen. We were supposed to check out at seven-thirty this morning, after breakfast. May I ask what this is all about, locking folks in a hotel where someone may or may not have been murdered?” He sighed and thrust his neck out (the way all men in my family do when feeling self-righteous or threatened), clearly reacting to a scripted line of questioning. “We didn’t hear a peep. My wife and I were in the double. My eldest son was in the single by the window. His younger brother was in a sleeping bag by the door.”

  At the next question his eyes and head rotated machine-like toward me—first the eyes, then the head. “He’s right here,” he said, passing me the receiver despite my mom’s punitive eyeballing that suggested he might as well hand me a loaded pistol for my turn at our family rendition of Russian roulette.

  Let me explain that back in the nineties the West Des Moines Holiday Inn was a mid-level business accommodation with upper-end ambitions and a hollow atrium center where you could lean over the railing to observe guest activity on any of the floors above or below. If the girl screamed, I should’ve heard it. But I didn’t hear it, even though I’d been awake a good part of the night, planning to flee Des Moines for some sun-drenched archipelago where I’d grow a beard and live off the land. (Davenport was our home, and we were still finding our feet after the Great Flood, which brought losses comparable to those in Des Moines, though in all honesty their losses were not our losses. I remain convinced that if we’d had even one living grandparent left in Davenport, including our drinking grandfather who caused his family so much grief, we never would’ve left.) I put the receiver to my ear, immediately surmising by the special agent’s captious tone that he was not a happy person, that over the course of his life he had known many disappointments.

  “You’re the guy in the bag by th
e door?”

  “That’s correct,” I said.

  “When did you get into town?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Yesterday morning? Last night? Crack of dawn? I asked when you got into town.”

  “Yesterday afternoon. Around four p.m.”

  “Fine,” he said. “So did you hear anything?”

  “No, sir. I wish I would’ve, but I didn’t.”

  At that, Zach made a grand motion of unzipping his suitcase, mumbling something to the effect that my pretty-boy responses would probably result in an invitation to a full interrogation. My mom halted his unzipping with a reared set of claw-nails perfectly manicured during the course of our pay-per-view detention. The special agent yawned, unconvincingly, which made me sense he was preparing a trick question.

  “Says here you’re from Davenport?”

  “We’re from Davenport, but we’re in the middle of moving here. It’s supposed to be our first day in the new house.”

  “Your first night in Des Moines?” he asked, as though finally stumbling on something interesting. “And a seventeen-year-old girl gets corded one floor below you?”

  “She got what?”

  “I’m sure you’ll read all about it,” he said, implying that the public’s increasing access to crime specifics was a slight on his profession. “Do you have any more information?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No strange noises? Nothing to report?”

  “I don’t think so—”

  “You don’t think?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Fine,” he said, just before the line cut out. I held the receiver to my ear at least another five seconds, thinking it best to leave my family with the impression that the call ended more graciously than it did. “Have a nice day,” I said, then hung up. Everyone was still but for their eyebrows shifting through poses of anxiety, disbelief, accusation, etc. I considered that until I opened my mouth again it might’ve all been construed as a mishap, an overblown robbery, maybe even a joke orchestrated by one of the pranksters from the old neighborhood. My dad drew a finger along the inside of his collar, again thrusting his neck out.

  “You’re sure of what, George?”

  “It sounds like she was strangled. With a telephone cord.”

  My mom turned to my dad. My dad turned to the ceiling. Zach turned to the parking lot six stories below. I remember feeling that all the furniture in the hotel was clenching each one of its screws, that the sun shining on the carpet and bed had suddenly sucked back its ultraviolet rays. But the moment hardly lasted five seconds before my dad was barking at Zach to drag the suitcases to the car, then disappearing downstairs, probably to visit the front desk and argue over the bill. I ended up checking for personal items under the beds and in the bathroom while my mom paced from one side of the window to the other, moving at half speed and stroking her upper left arm as though consoling it. On the drive from West Des Moines to Urbandale my dad tried to lighten the mood with a deadpan anecdote about the convoluted transportation of a Japanese lighthouse—or bell house, he wasn’t sure which—granted to an Iowan judge by the mayor of Kofu, Japan, one of Des Moines’s sister cities. We passed newly built shopping villages, megastores, labyrinthine parking lots, at least a dozen restaurants with cutesy misspelled names. Whereas in Davenport we were all content to restore our neighborhoods just as clean and cozy as they were before the flood, it appeared the goal in Des Moines was to take the opportunity to recast the city as a trendy metropolis on the move. I started feeling nauseous, suspecting we were traveling the same mysteriously looping streets and that any minute we’d be pulled over by the FBI.

  The first thing I noticed in the new neighborhood was the lineup of wimpy cedars with bobby socks and braces to keep them growing healthy and right. Our house sat on high ground halfway up the block, a red ribbon on the mailbox gaily proclaiming it SOLD BY GUNTHER REALTY! Most of the moving team was sprawled out and smoking on the lawn, looking even more hungover now that the time had come to hump our furniture uphill. My parents lined up at the sidewalk to take a full breath of their two-story home, likely comforting themselves with thoughts of the next flood, the shingled roof-islands of every house on the block but ours. Zach reminded them of the track star from Bettendorf who’d severely disabled himself while pushing a lawn mower up a schoolyard slope—a comment that only backfired. “They saved his legs,” my mom said, perking up. “There was even an article in Reader’s Digest. He’s back to hurdling again and he’s even faster than before. He broke a record at the Quad City Regionals.” My dad was already halfway up the driveway, scoping out every cigarette butt and Coke can tossed slovenly about his lawn. The movers staggered to their feet, knowing as well as we did that there was no point in pouting or putting up a fight.

  I spent most of that first night in my new bedroom above the garage, arranging my furniture and unpacking my boxes, for the first time fully appreciating all those plain familiar faces in the hallways of St. Boniface High, the outlandish sermons of my philosophical wrestling coach who went a full six minutes against the Great Dan Gable, even our next-door neighbor Randy Baker, who’d been teasing me with the same worn-out redhead jokes since I was six years old. I ended up trashing half the knickknacks I’d collected over the years, including a monkey carved out of a coconut and several Pine Derby race cars I’d whittled during my time in the Cub Scouts. While I had been unwilling to part with these juvenile treasures the week before, that night I hardly noticed giving them up, even faced with a set of bare bookshelves. My best explanation for this was a sudden preoccupation with the notion that the FBI agent I’d spoken to was actually the perpetrator of the crime he’d alleged to investigate. I was also overcome by jealous imaginings about my best friend Kevin Ralston’s pornographic future with Eva Davis, the girl I’d had a crush on for five years and never even kissed. Around midnight I called Kevin as though he were still living just down the road. I could see him pacing a horseshoe path around his garage-sale water bed when he promised to steal his dad’s car for a joint Mardi Gras getaway. (In the coming weeks, additional calls to my wider group of friends suggested a theory that in the absence of extreme boredom or abandonment, nine times out of ten the egocentric adolescent mind will flippantly shun the continued building of the sorts of connective memory bridges that long-distance loyalties so critically demand.) The trip never happened, probably because Mardi Gras was still five months off, and Kevin’s dad was a firefighter and Eucharistic minister whom Kevin admired too much.

  Two

  St. Pius High School was only ten minutes down Seventy-third Street on a hodgepodge campus occupied largely by a series of sexless concrete structures with the low stances of elementary schools committed to cold war. Never before had I witnessed such institutional pride in pint-sized statues on man-made knolls, obviously part of an attempt to project a multilayered landscape of saintly scholarship. The sports complex was located half a mile down the road, a honeycombed monstrosity of hallways leading to small workout rooms crammed with fetishistic, wire-based weight machines. On one of its many surrounding playing fields, during the first day of training camp, Zach drilled a running back so hard and rendered him senseless for so long that the kid arrived at his locker the next morning to discover all his football equipment replaced by a single cross-country jersey hanging on a hook. By the time school began Zach had already been noted in a Des Moines Register football preview as the Central Iowa Metro League’s “defensive secret weapon,” which, combined with his claim to be an integral assistant to the FBI’s search for the strangler Nicholas Parsons (he built a mysterious sympathy for himself by bowing his head and wandering off anytime someone asked what he’d heard in the middle of the night at the Holiday Inn), was enough for a virtual petal parade of acceptance into the St. Pius inner sanctum. I, on the other hand, after two weeks of classes, hadn’t formed a single promising alliance. I even found myself victim to several note-passing offenses of the following nature:
>
  “Your socks and sandals are sooooooo hot.”

  “Please extinguish the fire in your crotch.”

  “Maggie Whitcraft . . . third row, buckteeth . . . is looking for a lover/orthodontist.”

  It didn’t help matters that somewhere in the move I lost my sense of humor and couldn’t remember anyone’s names. I also couldn’t overcome the sensation that my fellow classmates were all strangely dis proportional with oddly shaped craniums packed with perversions. I didn’t know any Germans, but Des Moines’s teenagers all seemed a little German to me. Even the homecoming play, a simple tale about a group of blind children lost in the forest, was written by someone named Eckhard von Wolf. Which brings us to the scene where this story should have begun: my entrance into a makeshift and acoustically ramshackle theater cramped with student nitwits pegging one another with pennies, the air glinting coppery for my initial sighting of the lion-haired heroine Emily Schell. After finding an open seat at the far side of the front row, I embarked on an immediate voyeuristic operation to pinpoint the exact location of her beauty. This effort concluded on the joint effect of her heart-shaped cheeks and the curve at the tip of her nose. Based on her athletic confidence and ease, I had no doubts about the impressive figure roaming beneath her amorphous black frock. She searched the proscenium (if there was no actress named Emily Schell, then there was no proscenium, either; it was a rectangular stage with pleated skirting and a knee-high guardrail), swatting imaginary mosquitoes and poking branches. She crumbled to her knees. “Boys!” she cried out. “Where are you, boys!”

  Two waifs pawed their way from the peripheral darkness to the halo of light at center stage, cowering in their suspenders. The actress swung around and—her theatrical contacts rendering her as blind as her character—reached for the sound of their footsteps while accidentally leg-swiping a plastic tree. Despite the blunder she remained astoundingly in character, addressing the noise of the wobbling stand as though reacting to a roiling thunder deep in the heart of the forest. Laughter broke throughout the auditorium, beginning at the front row and rolling backward. I cackled urgently along, attempting to rein in the distraction so that I could quickly end it and we could return our collective focus to the simple movements of the blind actress whose bare legs were now shimmering long and white in the direct gaze of hot canned lights. She pulled her tawny hair taut over her forehead. When she squeezed herself for warmth, I put myself in that squeeze. I turned to a ferret-eyed classmate next to me, craving the actress’s name more than anything else, but too meek with loneliness to ask even that.