That’s what the Schiavo house looked like. It was so strange and surreal against the backdrop of deep thick night that no matter what they were doing there, it looked suspicious.
And who were they! Workmen. As we got closer I tried to see if I knew any of the men but not one was familiar. Dressed in no special style or uniform, they were guys in yellow and orange hard hats setting up scaffolding. Around the house they were quickly erecting an intricate system of interlocking pipes, struts, and connectors. When done, it would completely encircle the building, holding it captive like an insect trapped inside some kind of giant metal spiderweb. We stopped on the sidewalk in front of the house and watched them work. You only needed to watch for five minutes to know these guys really knew what they were doing. No wasted effort, no horsing around, no cluster of fuckoffs scarfing donuts and avoiding work. This crew was serious; they were here to do the job and then get out.
What was extraordinary was how little noise they made. To fit the strangeness of the scene it would have been better if they had been completely silent, but that wasn’t the case. They made noise—metal struck metal, the creak and strain of things being fitted, bolted, erected. With all the activity and workers on the site it should have been a hell of a lot louder. But it wasn’t. You heard things, sure, but not enough to believe it was somehow real—how could all this go on so quietly?
“They’re making no noise.”
The boy rubbed his nose. “I was thinking that. The whole scene’s got like a muffler on it.”
“What are they doing to the house? What’s with the scaffolding? Why are they doing it in the middle of the night?”
“Beats me, Chief. My job was just to get you here.”
“Bullshit.” I didn’t believe him for a minute, but it was useless arguing. He’d tell me only what he wanted and I’d have to figure out the rest.
I walked to the house and asked a worker where the foreman was. He pointed to a tall dark man who looked Indian passing a few feet away. Taking a few fast steps, I caught up with him. “Excuse me? Could I talk to you a minute?”
He looked me up and down like I was an eggplant or a whore he was considering buying.
“My name is McCabe. I’m chief of police in Crane’s View.”
Unimpressed, he crossed his arms and said nothing.
“Why are you here? Do you have permits? What are you doing to this place? Where are the Schiavos?”
He remained mute until a small smile twitched on at the edges of his mouth. As if what I had said was funny. I ran the tape back in my head but nothing on it sounded funny to me. “I asked you a question.”
“Dot does nut mean I have dee an-suh.” Sure enough, he spoke with the kind of thick Indian accent where the tongue never moves in the mouth, as if it were a cow lying in the middle of a road and words had to drive around it to get out.
“You wanna explain that?” The boy stepped in toward the foreman and got up so close they could have touched. His voice was one hundred percent disagreeable—a verbal shove in the other’s chest.
“I explain nothing. I’m working! Can you not see I’m busy?”
“You won’t be busy after I kick your ass, Gunga Din.”
The Indian’s eyes widened in disbelief and rage. “You little fuckah—”
Whomp! The kid kicked him in the balls so fast and hard that the sound filled the air. Gasping, the man fell down holding his nuts. As soon as he hit the ground, the boy kicked him in the face—boom boom boom—like trying to kick in a door. With both hands on his crotch the foreman had no chance to cover his head before the kicks rained down.
The boy smiled and stretched his arms out like wings, like he was doing the Greek “sirtaki” dance. Zorba the Greek on your head, bam bam bam. The viciousness and speed of his assault was brutal. The kid went from zero to a hundred, from chat to blood, in a second. And that kid was me.
Seeing him attack, part of me shouted Yes!
We lose it, it disappears, evaporates. The edge, the courage, the black madness and abandon of the young. The dazzle of living one hundred percent in the minute. It goes away, leaks out of us like water through cracks. Cracks that come from growing older. They start when you buy whole-life insurance policies and mortgages, or hear the results of not-so-good physical checkups. They start when there’s a need rather than a desire for warm baths. Safety over spontaneity, comfort over commotion. Part of me hated it. Not the growing older, but becoming tame, upstanding, predictable, halfhearted, skeptical about too much. A good-sized chunk of me loved this flipped-out kid stomping a man for no reason other than a shitty attitude, a dismissive look in his eyes. That part of me wanted to join in on the beating. Am I ashamed to admit it? Not at all.
I grabbed the boy and dragged him away from the Indian. His body felt like electricity through steel; he was all high voltage and tensile strength. I am very strong but didn’t know if I could handle him.
“Stop! Okay, stop. He’s down, you win.”
“Get off me, asshole!” He tried throwing another kick but was out of range.
“Enough!”
“Don’t tell me—” He twisted around and threw a punch at my face. I blocked it and in the same motion, grabbed his arm and twisted it up around his back in a hammerlock. Then I put my other arm around his throat in a chokehold.
No good. With the heel of his cowboy boot he stomped down hard on the top of my right foot. The pain was like fire. I let go. He jumped away and hands up, started dancing around like a boxer throwing jabs, ducking and weaving. Who was he fighting? Me, the Indian, the world, life.
“Who the fuck do you think you are, huh? You think you can beat me? Think you can take me? Come on, try it!”
I stood like a flamingo on one leg, holding my throbbing foot and watching him taunt me. The Indian lay on his stomach, hands under him, moaning. Teen me kept dancing around, doing Muhammad Ali routines. A group of workers had gathered to watch our festivities. While I held my foot, one of them stepped out of the crowd and whacked the kid on the head with a board. Afterward the guy just stood there with the two-by-four in his hand, looking stupid, like he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do now.
The kid was suddenly on the ground on all fours, head hanging low. Someone was helping the Indian up. I tested my foot to see if it still worked. It hurt, but I’d survive. “All right, that’s it, everything stops. Who’s in charge, who’s the construction company, where are your permits? I want to see everything right now.”
“Frannie?” A familiar voice said my name. Still down on the ground, the boy looked up slowly because it was his name too. Nearby Johnny Petangles stood holding a large bottle of club soda. He stared at me with impassive eyes. “What’re you doing, Frannie?”
I looked from him to the house, the workers, to little Fran on the ground. It felt like every one of them was staring at me but none made a sound. And then the idea arrived. I pointed at the house. “What do you see, Johnny? What do you see over there?”
He tipped back his bottle and took a long drink. Lowering it he burped and clumsily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Nothing. I see a house, Frannie. You want some of my club soda?”
I limped through the crowd of workers to the house. The air smelled of freshly cut wood, burnt metal, and gasoline. It smelled of hammered nails and power tools just turned off, sweat in a flannel shirt, coffee spilled on stone. It smelled of many men working at hard physical jobs. I took hold of one of the long steel bars in the scaffolding and shook it till things rattled.
“What’s this, Johnny? Do you see this?”
“I told you, it’s a house.”
“You don’t see the scaffolding?”
“What’s that?”
“Metal bars wrapped around the house. Like what they put on when they’re fixing it, doing construction?”
“Nope. No cat folding. Just a house.” He said those three words as if he were singing—da dee da—and gave one of his rare Johnny smiles.
&n
bsp; I pointed to the boy on the ground. “Can you see him?”
“Who?”
“Johnny can’t see me, I told you. No one can see any of this but you.”
“Why?”
The boy flickered—was there, gone, there again like interference on a TV. Then he began to fade. The construction workers too, as well as the metal spiderweb around the house. All of it began fading, growing dimmer, changing from solid to transparent to gone.
“Why only me?”
“Find the dog, Frannie. Find it and we can talk again.”
I tried to step toward the kid but used the bad foot. The pain that flew up my leg almost buckled me. “Which dog? The one we buried? Old Verture?”
“Who you talking to, Frannie?” Johnny had his mouth over the bottle hole. He blew into it and made the low, sad toot of a boat leaving the harbor.
Everything had disappeared. The Schiavo house was no longer encased in a metal web. There was no sign of a construction site, workers, anything out of the ordinary. No bent nails on the ground, wood shavings, tools, electrical cords, discarded Coca-Cola cans. Just an empty house on a well-kept lot on a quiet street at three in the A.M.
Petangles blew into his bottle again. “How come you’re out here tonight, Frannie? I never see you when I’m out walking.” He tooted once more.
“Gimme that stupid bottle!” Snatching it out of his hand, I threw it as hard as I could. But even that disappeared, because wherever it hit, it didn’t make a sound. I started walking home. He followed.
“Johnny, go home. Go to bed. Don’t follow me. Don’t come with me. I love you, but don’t bug me tonight. Okay? Not tonight.”
Bill Pegg turned into the school parking lot while I looked out the car window. When we stopped I reached down and flicked off both the siren and flashing light. After the motor died, we sat there a moment gathering strength for what came next.
“Who’s the kid?”
“Fifteen-year-old girl named Antonya Corando—new student this year. Eleventh grade.”
“Fifteen in eleventh grade? She must be smart.”
“I guess not so smart.”
Bill shook his head and reached for his clipboard. I got out of the car and checked my pockets to see if I had everything I needed: notebook, pen, depression. Ten minutes after I entered the office that morning, we got the call from the principal at Crane’s View high school saying they’d found a body in the women’s toilet. She was sitting on the can and was discovered because the syringe she’d used was on the floor in front of the stall. Some girl saw it, looked under the door, and ran for help.
We walked into the high school and, as always happened when I went there, I shuddered. This had been the worst place in the world for six years of my life. Now a lifetime later—way past the Himalayas of youth and down onto the plains of middle age—I still got the creeps whenever I entered the building.
The principal, Redmond Mills, was waiting for us in the entranceway. I liked Redmond and wished there had been a principal like him when I was a student at the school. The high point in his life had been attending the Woodstock Festival. He wore his sixties sensibilities like too much patchouli, but better that than the old fascists who ran the place back in our day. Redmond cared a lot about the students, his teachers, and Crane’s View. I often bumped into him at the diner across the street from the school at ten at night because he had just left work and was getting a bite to eat before going home. Today he looked stricken.
“Bad news huh, Redmond?”
“Terrible! Terrible! It’s the first time it’s ever happened here, Frannie. The news is already all over the school. That’s all the kids are talking about.”
“I bet.”
“Did you know her?” Bill asked gently as if the dead girl had been the principal’s daughter.
Redmond looked left and right as if about to say dangerous information and didn’t want to be overheard. “She was a nebbish, Bill! Homework was her middle name. Her essays were always ten pages too long and she was supposedly cataleptic if she didn’t make the high honor roll. See my point? That’s what I don’t understand about this. She carried her books against her chest like she was in a fifties TV show and was so shy she always looked down when teachers talked to her.”
He turned to me and his face went cynical. In a loud, resentful voice he said, “I’ve got kids at this school who are devil worshippers, Frannie. They’ve got swastikas tattooed on their necks and their girlfriends last took a bath when they were born. Them I could see killing themselves. But not this girl, not Antonya.”
What immediately came to mind was an image of Pauline in the bathroom last night wearing only eye makeup and an attitude. Who knows what Antonya Corando did behind her closed doors when everyone thought she was doing calculus homework? Who knows what she dreamed, what she hid, what she pretended to be? What on this earth did she hope to gain from sticking a needle full of heroin in her arm while sitting on a toilet?
“You didn’t move her?”
“Move her? Why would I do that, Frannie? She’s dead! Where am I going to put her, in my office?”
I patted his shoulder. “It’s okay. Take it easy, Redmond.” His eyes had crazy in them by then, but he was a gentle man. Why shouldn’t they after what he’d seen that morning?
We walked down empty, silent halls. In contrast, through small windows in the classroom doors, I could see the bright, buzzing life of school everywhere. Teachers wrote on blackboards, kids in white aprons and plastic goggles worked over Bunsen burners. In a language lab two boys were horsing around until they saw us and disappeared fast. In another room a beautiful tall girl dressed in black stood in front of a class reading aloud from a large red book. When she tossed her hair I thought, Oh boy, Frannie from last night would love her. I looked in another room and recognized my old English teacher. The old bastard had once made me memorize a poem by Christina Rossetti, which to this day I couldn’t forget:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me—
Fitting for what we were about to see. Redmond stopped at a door and took a key out of his pocket. “I didn’t know what else I should do, so I locked it.”
“Good idea. Let’s have a look.”
Pushing it open, he held it for us to go first. The light, that false, bright, terrible light of a public toilet, made everything grimmer. Nothing could hide here—no place for shadows, everything was on display. There were six stalls but only one of the doors was open.
For her last day on earth Antonya Corando wore a gray Skidmore College short-sleeved sweatshirt, a black skirt, and a pair of Doc Martens shoes. That made me wince because they were the brand hip kids wore. Pauline said dismissively that anyone who wore Docs was only trying to be cool. Poor square Antonya who always did her homework—buying a pair of those shoes had probably been a very large gesture for her. And it must have taken courage for her to wear them when she knew how closely kids check out each other’s clothing. Maybe she first put them on in the secrecy of her bedroom and walked around checking herself in the mirror to see how they looked, how she walked in them, how she came across as a Doc Martens girl.
But the worst part was her socks. They were fire-engine red with little white hearts all over them. Her skin above the socks was a different white and so transparent you could see a swarm of fine blue veins just below the surface.
I am only a policeman in a small town. But over the years have seen enough violence and death both here and in Vietnam, where I was a medic to vouch for this—most times it is the small, irrelevant things that burn the horror into your heart. The dead are only that—finished. But what surrounds them afterward, or what they brought with them to their final minute, survives. A teenage girl overdoses on heroin but what flattens you are her socks with white hearts on them. A man wraps his silver car around a tree killing him and his whole family, but what makes it unforgettable is that that song you love, “Sally Go Round the Roses,” is still playing on the
radio in the wreck when you get to it. A blue New York Mets baseball cap spotted with blood on a living room floor, the scorched family cat in the yard of the burnt house, the Bible the suicide left opened to Song of Solomon on the bed next to him. These are what you remember because they are the last scraps of their last day, their last moments with a heartbeat. And those things remain after they’re gone, the final snapshots in their album. Antonya went to her drawer that morning and specifically chose the red socks with the white hearts. How could that image not crush you, knowing where she would end up three hours later?
Redmond began to cry. Bill and I looked at each other. I motioned him to take the principal out. There was no reason for him to be in the bathroom anymore.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t believe it.”
My assistant Bill Pegg is a good man. A few years ago he lost his daughter to cystic fibrosis and that ordeal turned him into a different person. He now has a special manner with the shocked or grieving; a way to keep them balanced in the first unbearable minutes after real horror has entered their lives. When they’re trying to understand the new language of grief, as well as cope with the loss of gravity, the weightlessness that comes with desolation or great suffering. When I asked Bill how he did it he said, “I just go there with them and tell them what I know about it. That’s all you can do.”
After they left and the door hissed shut I went over to Antonya. I got down on one knee in front of her. If someone had come in then how silly it would have looked—like I was proposing to a sleeping girl sitting on the toilet.
One arm hung straight down at her side. The other lay across her leg. I assumed she had been right-handed, so I looked at her left arm to see if I could find the needle mark. Her head rested against the white tile wall, eyes closed. The needle mark was a small red welt just below the crease lines in her left elbow. I unconsciously felt for a pulse. Of course there wasn’t one. Then I reached up and touched that mark.
The Wooden Sea Page 6
