The Wooden Sea

by Jonathan Carroll

  “Where the hell are they going? You gotta to be shitting me!” I bit my hand. It hurt, but I had to do something to vent my frustration.

  Two stupid cops stood on my doorstep, effectively trapping me in my own damned garage. And even if I was able to escape, what was I supposed to do now that the car with the evidence had just taken off? Where were they going? What did they think they were doing? In truth I knew exactly what they were doing and it made total sense—they wanted to get out of there because they carried a body in their car. But what the hell was I supposed to do in the meantime—wait there with the shovel until either they decided to come back or my head popped?

  Luckily a little police muscle went into action. Knowing Officer Adele and her diplomatic manner, she was probably the one who started banging on the front door so loudly that they could have heard the sound down the block. That was Adele’s way of doing police work, but for the first time in all the years we had worked together I was happy for it.

  The Isuzu disappeared completely from view just as the music in the house stopped. Some more time passed but then there was Pauline’s voice, joined by the others. I was so relieved that I stuck out my tongue and crossed my eyes. The three of them spoke a while, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then came the sound of the front door closing. I assumed they had all gone into the house. Which meant I had very little time to escape before they came out again. I looked around the garage for anything beside the too-loud and obvious car that could get me away from there fast and silently.

  At the beginning of the summer Magda was inspired by some rah-rah article on fitness she read and bought a mountain bike. Pauline and I were struck dumb by the gesture. As expected, my wife used it maybe three times before deciding she wasn’t the big calves/wet armpits kind of girl. The minute she showed me the bike I christened it Tinkerbell because of its ridiculous color—gold-metal-flake pink.

  I hate bicycles and bicycling. They poke you in the ass and make you pant for no good reason. Bikes are also dangerous as hell and serious traffic hazards. Furthermore, people who use them are invariably self-righteous about various unappealing subjects—ecology, fitness, or their resting pulse rate. The hell with them—when I want my heart to beat fast I’ll have sex.

  So dig this—the ultimate indignity: there goes Chief of Police McCabe pedaling furiously down his street like a fucking wacko on a cute little pink bike. And is that a dirty shovel lying across the handlebars of the bike? Indeed it is. But can’t the man see that the tires on it are so low on air that they might as well be flat?

  The bike was small, and because I didn’t adjust the seat before launching myself, my knees came up almost to my chest as I pedaled, making the whole experience ten times more uncomfortable and ridiculous-looking.

  Follow that Isuzu! But how could I when it had a five-minute head start on me and two hundred more horsepower than I did? Down one street, down another. Looking everywhere for their car. The shovel slipping around on the handlebars and almost dropping a half dozen times.

  Passing too many people I knew, I tried as hard as I could not to be seen. Failed miserably.

  “Whoa there, Chief. Nice bike!” Smirk.

  “Hey, Fran, you suddenly going athletic?” Big laugh.

  Or just plain smiles and more chuckles as these people—my friends and neighbors—watched a fool roll by with his high-pumping knees and semiflat tires.

  I thought I saw their car going left at the intersection of Broadway and April Street but most likely that was wishful thinking. I kept trying to figure out where they might go. All at once I dropped the shovel and, braking hard, listened to it clatter and dance down the street. I picked it up and started again. George must have been driving the car now because he knew Crane’s View. But where would my friend go? If he were writing the instructions for how to get out of this fix, what would he say?

  Pedal pedal pedal—pedaling through town I kept imagining the music from The Wizard of Oz when Miss Gulch rides away on her bicycle with Toto the dog her captive. Pedal pedal pedal– this was definitely not how I had imagined my last days on earth.

  I was miserably out of shape; my cigarette lungs were screaming help; every moment I felt like my whole body might just cave in and stop. The number of possible places they might have gone was just too big. I had to make a choice now and go with it before my body disintegrated.

  “All right, the woods. Let’s go to the woods.” And that’s what I did. At Mobile Lane I hung a left and took a shortcut toward the Tyndall house that I had been using for forty years. Now that I knew where I was heading I felt better in my head but my body was shot. When she was enthusing about the benefits of her new exercise regime, Magda had told me that riding a bicycle was second only to swimming in total aerobic training. I said uh-huh and continued reading the newspaper. Now sadly I knew what she meant. I was sweating, panting, and cursing at the same time. Simultaneous breakdown on all fronts. Was that aerobic too? And those woods behind Lionel Tyndall’s house suddenly seemed a lot farther away than I remembered. Then again it had been many years since I had gone to that part of Crane’s View on foot, or any kind of pedal other than a gas pedal. Exercise fiends always crow that you see more when you’re walking or hiking. But the only thing I saw more of at the moment was my fury and frustration at trying to move Tinkerbell forward at more than a crawl.

  When it felt like things couldn’t get any worse I heard the sound of a siren coming up fast behind me. For a molten moment I felt like I had when I was a kid and forever in trouble with the law: All I could think was run–get out of there. Don’t let them catch you! I even considered jumping off the bike and sprinting for cover. But if I was the cop in the car and saw that, I’d wonder gee, how come that fellow on the pink bike is running away? So instead of fleeing, I put my head down as low as it would go and bravely pedaled on, hoping the gods or maybe even the gang from Rat’s Potato would help me out here.

  And I guess someone did because the patrol car screamed by me way too fast and straight on down the road. I’m sure whoever was driving was having such a good time playing with the siren and high speed that he didn’t think a second about the sunken-headed man puffing along on a bicycle. Which gave me something new to think/worry about as I took the last few lefts and rights: Where was that car going in such a dangerous hurry? It was departmental policy not to speed in town unless there was real trouble somewhere. What new complication or calamity had just happened?

  Luckily there was Tyndall’s big house, and immediately behind it the aqueduct that was another part of the shortcut to the woods if you were on foot or a bike. For the only time since I’d set off from my house I was happy to be riding these wheels. Another five minutes and I would come to the road that led off into the woods. If there was no sign of George I hadn’t a clue of what to do next.

  There was no sign of George. I took the road anyway and drove into the forest. If you’d said there was a steep hill ahead that I had to climb, I would have gotten off the bike, turned around, and pushed it home, to hell with the consequences.

  I rode slowly on, seeing nothing, growing more confused and disappointed by the foot. Still, when I got to the end of the woods I turned around and came back, looking just as hard as I had before. An old policeman’s instincts die hard. Looking back and forth from one side of the shadowed road to the other and then in among the trees for a sign—any sign that they had come here to bury the body. But how could they do that if they didn’t have a shovel?

  “Damn you, George, why didn’t you do what I said? It would have been the easiest way out of this mess.” Which I knew wasn’t really true but it felt good to say it to no one but the trees and Tinkerbell.

  Cars flew past. I wobbled/pedaled as close to the side of the road as possible. I didn’t want to be seen but how do you avoid that when you’re in the middle of nowhere riding a pink bicycle? Never once did it cross my rattled mind that the Isuzu boys were in a four-wheel-drive vehicle which—ergo!—m
eant they could go off the road.

  Shortly before I gave up and was beginning to think about my next move, I looked to one side of the road and saw Little Frannie emerging from a dark clump of pine trees. He saw me but didn’t appear one bit surprised. Hands stuffed deep in his khaki pockets, he didn’t look happy. Rolling slowly over to him, I put my feet down to stop.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He wouldn’t look at me. “That’s a pretty cool-looking bike. Except it’s pink.”

  For one ridiculous second I felt embarrassed and an urgent need to explain. “Well, it’s not mine. It belongs to my wife. Where are the other guys?”

  “Back there in the trees.” His voice was sad and quiet. He sighed deeply when he finished the sentence.

  “How come you’re out here?”

  Looking at the ground he mumbled, “They told me to go home.”

  “Can you show me where they are?” I tried not to sound impatient. If I pissed him off now I was in big trouble.

  He brightened right up—this was an adult’s invitation to go back into the action. “Yeah, I’ll show you! Are you going to take the bike? How come it’s got such big tires?”

  Back when I was his age, things like mountain bikes didn’t exist, so I understood his skepticism.

  “It drives better that way; especially in the woods, over rocks and stuff. Hop on—we’ll ride it in and you can show me where they are. Then you can take it for a ride yourself if you like.”

  He jumped on, shouting gleefully, “You steer and I’ll be the Dreampilot! I’ll tell you where to go.”

  “Okay, Mr. Dreampilot. Hold the shovel.”

  I hadn’t seen them because they had driven a good ways into the woods and down into a small ravine that couldn’t be seen from the road. When we reached Floon’s car no one was around, but the body still lay in the trunk—not a good sign.

  “Where are they?” Leaning the bike against a tree, I turned in a complete circle but saw nothing.

  The boy looked too. “They were looking for a place to bury him before; somewhere under the trees. But they wouldn’t let me come. That Floon guy called me a little pisser.”

  Instinctively I touched his head and almost said when I was your age I was a lot more than just a little pisser. But I held back and tried to sound reassuring instead. “Hey, that’s a compliment! I’m a big pisser and proud of it, but that’s only because I’m grown up. Give me the shovel. You want to take the bike now and go for a ride?”

  He shook his head. “No, I want to go with you.”

  “Okay, come on. We’ll leave the bike here and go find them.”

  We walked around for minutes but found nothing and heard nothing. The woods were fragrant and full of leaves and flickering shadows. Soon autumn would arrive and the smells in here would change—they’d become thicker, funkier—things would die, fall, cover the forest floor, and rot. Old wood, old leaves, later on it would snow and all those dark final colors of winter would be covered by the white.

  I would never see any of it again. The thought was unbearable. I tried with all my strength to clear it from my mind. We walked on, stopping once in a while to listen for the others.

  “Who are you?” the boy asked.

  I hesitated, smiled. “I’m you, grown up.”

  He studied the ground and thought that one over. “But how can we both be here at the same time?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened. I can’t explain it. I guess it’s magic.”

  “Okay.” He rocked back on his heels, saw something on the ground, bent to pick up an interesting-looking stick that was lying against a rock. His voice was calm and reasonable when he spoke. As if what I’d said was no big deal. “I knew we were kind of related or something but I didn’t know how. You’re really me when I grow up?”

  “Yes. I’m you when you’re forty-seven years old.”

  “That’s pretty old. But you look okay. Do you still have a penis?”

  That stopped me. “A penis? Well yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Marvin Bruce told me your penis grows back inside your body when you get to be forty.”

  Just the name and memory of that skinny, yellow-toothed, brown-nosing sewer rat shot the hair up on the back of my neck. I said a little too adamantly, “Marvin Bruce picks his nose and eats it. Are you gonna trust a guy who does that?”

  “You know Marvin?”

  “Sure. He’s a jerk. He probably grew up and became Kenneth Starr.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind. Let’s go.”

  We found them as far into the woods as you could go. Both men were sitting on the ground staring blankly into the distance. Chuck lay asleep on Floon’s left foot. Only George looked up slowly when we approached. The expression on his face said he was trying to wrestle his mind back from a place very far away but having a hard time doing it. Maybe that was why he didn’t appear surprised to see me.

  “Frannie. Here you are. Are you all right? You look very pale.”

  “I’m okay. What are you doing? Why are you just sitting? There’s a body in the back of that car. You can’t just leave it there like that.”

  “We were about to go back for it. We stopped to rest and then Caz started giving me details about his project. It’s absolutely astounding. You can’t imagine the ramifications of what he’s attempting to do.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Get up, George. We have to dig a hole now and stop wasting time. Did you find a place yet?”

  The boy wandered away, poking his stick into the ground.

  “Anywhere around here should be all right, Frannie. It’s as far from the road as we can be. We’ll have to go down deep, though, to prevent the animals from digging it up when we’re gone.”

  I stabbed the shovel into the earth. It clanged loudly against a tree root. It was like the day I had tried to bury Old Vertue out here—thick roots crisscrossed the forest floor just below the surface. I had learned the hard way that cutting through them was impossible.

  I walked back and forth pushing the shovel into the ground every few feet but it was all the same—roots galore. The only sounds were the birds, me poking with the shovel and the boy swishing his stick, hitting trees, swatting at their branches.

  “I don’t think we can do it here. There are just too many goddamned roots.”

  “Should we go get the body or not?”

  I dropped the shovel on the ground and crossed my arms. In my mind all I could picture was a giant traffic light stuck on red. Something had to be done, a decision had to be made fast, but what?

  A wind kicked up. The air was suddenly filled with the lush scent of pine and the sexy hiss of a warm breeze through summer’s trees. Without thinking I lifted my head and sniffed the air. “My God, what a beautiful smell.”

  As if it couldn’t decide on whether to go or stay, sunlight flickered across different parts of the boy’s body. His head was bowed. From the look of it, he’d recently gotten his hair cut by Vernon the town barber, dead twenty years now.

  Seeing something on the ground, Little Fran dropped his stick and slowly began to bend down. His eyes were glued to one spot. “Hey, look at this!” He was twenty feet away. I was annoyed that he was distracting me, plus I couldn’t see what had him so excited. A kid thing probably. No time for that now. George and Floon stood waiting for me to decide. Ironic—these two megabrains waiting for instructions from F. McCabe, once deemed “a candidate for the gas chamber” by an enraged high school principal before expelling him. But I had no idea what to tell them to do—the traffic light in my mind was still red.

  “Look!” The boy snatched at something on the ground.

  Rising again, he held something between his thumb and index fingers. The rest of his fingers were splayed out like he didn’t want them to touch whatever it was he held. Until it moved, I thought it was only another stick.

  It was a lizard or a chameleon, I don’t know which—I ain’t no herpetologist. I should have aske
d George the expert on everything but I was too excited to care. The poor little fucker had been minding its own lizard business, taking a little sun on the forest floor. Until without warning it was yanked up in the air by its long tail. For a moment. For a moment it stayed that way, swinging and twisting in circles desperately trying to get away. Then its tail snapped off and Mr. Lizard hit the ground running. The boy squealed his delight and dismay. More important, when the lizard ran away it skittered up, along and then over my shovel. The picture of those two things together, one on top of the other—lizard on shovel—touched something in me like flame to dry paper.

  Without a second’s hesitation I remembered George and me looking at Antonya Corando’s school notebooks. And I heard him say there were only two images that kept recurring in all of her strange, prophetic drawings—that shovel and a lizard.

  My eyes glued to the spot on the ground where the kid had picked up the lizard, I stepped over and said, “Dig here.”

  “There? It’s right under that tree. There will be roots everywhere.”

  “Pick up the fucking shovel and dig here, Floon. Or I’ll stick it up your ass, blade first.”

  “But, Frannie, he’s right. The roots—”