Beach Strip

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  It had been cool and blustery beneath the highway bridges over the canal, but on the beach strip it was warm and benign. Walkers, skaters, and joggers herded themselves along the boardwalk like shoppers in search of bargains, which is what they were. This late in the year, every warm day is a clear-out, an end-of-season event. Get it while it’s hot and cheap.

  While walking back to my house, I thought about my father and how horribly he had died nearly thirty years earlier. I entered the garden from the boardwalk on the beach strip. The garden shed door looked secure, the impatiens blooms were orgiastic, the grasses in the sand along the fenceline were harvest brown and no longer reaching for the sun. Everything had that melancholy feeling you recognize as a schoolkid when you realize summer vacation is over, and the feeling remains with us as adults.

  At the wire fence separating the Blairs’ house from the laneway, Jock Blair stood puffing on his pipe, his head a mobile jack-o’-lantern, round and pink above a plaid shirt and dung-coloured trousers held up by red suspenders. His face bloomed into extra creases with his smile, and when he saw me he ducked his head and said, “Good day, good day,” repeating it like a shorebird’s call.

  I smiled back, raising his blush level higher, just as Maude Blair rose from behind a large plastic garbage pail into which she had been dropping cuttings from a dogwood bush. She waved and began tottering toward me on hockey stick legs that ended in canvas sneakers, holding one arm up and calling, “Josephine! Josephine!” in a burr that always brought me visions of wool tartans.

  Brushing her husband aside, she reached to grip my sleeve and pull me away from the boardwalk, looking around as though searching for something lost. “There’s a man been in your garden,” she hissed. “Jock saw him, didn’t he?”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “He’d a bushy beard, dressed like a poor soul come outta the gutter, Jock tells me. And wild-eyed. Frightened the jeepers out of Jock, he did. He’s gone now. Jock said he watched him leave, tottering like a Glasgow drunk toward the canal. You didn’t see him, did you?”

  I told her no, I had not seen anyone like that. I knew who she meant, of course.

  She leaned closer to my ear. “Jock, he’s worried about you, lass. I can tell. All the tragedy you’ve been through, and Jock and me, we don’t want anything bad happening to you now.”

  I wanted to wrap her in a hug for her concern, but I didn’t. I simply thanked her and smiled over her shoulder at Jock, who remained at the fence, his face glowing in deeper shades of crimson like a setting sun.

  “Will you be needing more marmalade?” Maude called out as I began walking along the boardwalk again. “I’ll send some over with Jock.”

  I didn’t need the marmalade, and I didn’t want to enter the house yet. I thanked her and joined the other people in the sun, hearing Maude’s voice, her nagging softened by the highland burr, telling Jock he should put the cover back on the rose spray, asking, “An’ were ye born in a barn? Because ye never close anythin’, never.” I smiled at the things that both bond and destroy marriages, the imperfectness that challenges romantic illusions. It reminded me of Gabe and me. It reminded me that neither of us achieved the perfection in reality that dominated our image of each other. If I was imperfect enough to cheat on Gabe, could he be imperfect enough to kill me for it? And himself as well? Did the alcohol in his blood confuse him so much that he decided to do himself first when I was late arriving?

  I had been having these thoughts, and variations on them, since Gabe’s death. They invaded my mind like musical ear-worms, those old songs you don’t even like that keep playing in an endless loop within your mind. Thoughts about what might have happened that night had become my own personal earworm. I would have preferred something by Captain & Tennille.

  THE BOARDWALK WAS FILLED WITH JUST ENOUGH PEOPLE to make me feel secure, and the sun’s last rays actually appeared to grow warmer as the day began dying. I walked toward Tuffy’s, past the house with the helicopter on the front porch and past Hans and Trudy’s castle.

  The bodies moving ahead of me were a chaos of speed and rhythm, earthbound gliders on in-line skates and stuttering strollers with canes, and amid them I saw the bird’s-nest hair of the silently screaming woman. She crossed the boardwalk on a path leading from the lake back to Beach Boulevard, vanishing between stands of high grass on the shore. I stepped toward the beach through the nearest break in the grass onto a section of the shoreline that had rocky outcroppings, a thin strand unattractive to bathers. A man ahead of me was tossing a stick into the water for his Labrador to retrieve, over and over. Three stubborn pines, their limbs twisted like the arms of spastic dancers, marked the edge of the grass line. I stood among them, waiting for her.

  She emerged from the grass, head down, arms folded within a pink cotton cardigan over straight and bony shoulders that appeared like the last rung of a short ladder, legs clad in plaid slacks. She walked with her eyes fastened three steps ahead of her, measuring her world that way, and approached the pines. When she was a step away, I spoke aloud to her. “Hello.”

  She stopped in front of me, startled but not prepared to flee, as I had expected she might. Instead, she stood frowning as though I had delivered a mild insult, and I realized she was trying to place me, trying to identify me.

  “Are you Mrs. Dalgetty?” I asked.

  She nodded dumbly. I saw ancient beauty amid the lines of her face and around a mouth shaped like an inverted crescent. She could not have been more than a few years older than me, but the currency of those years had been spent differently. In that moment, I thought of my own concerns about aging, of how reluctant I was to let go of those parts of myself that I had treasured when I was young, to leave them for the passage of time to raze and finally level. First we ripen, then we rot. Mrs. Dalgetty was outpacing me in the rotting stage.

  “You live over the upholstery shop.”

  She nodded again, and her mouth actually formed a semblance of a smile. Someone knew who she was. Someone could confirm she existed. “That’s me,” she said.

  I offered a hand. “My name is Josie Marshall,” I said.

  She pulled away as though ducking a blow, and I reached to grab her arm.

  “Why do you stand behind my house and stare at it?” I asked.

  She shook her head, and I realized she was unafraid of me, but she continued to look around, confirming that no one was eavesdropping.

  “Talk to me, please. My husband is dead, and …” My mouth tasted like sand and I had to start over. “I’m sure someone killed him. I just wondered if you could help me. Can you help me? Because the police say he committed suicide, and I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that.”

  Her head kept moving as she spoke, twisting from side to side, looking up and across the strand in a motion that I thought at first was spastic, then realized was driven by fear. “He killed Dougal,” she said. “He killed him, Dougal, my husband.”

  “No,” I said. “Gabe did not kill anyone. Not your husband, not himself. Gabe would never do that.”

  “That’s what I heard,” she said. “That’s what they told me.”

  “Who? Who told you that?”

  She pulled away, dismissing me with a wave of her hand.

  “Tell me about this man they call Grizz.”

  She looked back at me, then at the sand near her feet. “Who?”

  “Grizz. Your husband worked for him. Is he one of Mike Pilato’s men? Where is he? Where can I find him?”

  She looked directly at me for the first time. “I never heard of no Grizz,” she said. “Don’t go sayin’ that I know anybody named Grizz, ‘cause I don’t, you hear me?”

  “Someone keeps looking for him, at my house,” I said. “The police can’t find him. Have they asked you? Have they talked to you about this person?”

  She shook her head, turned, and walked quickly away, with her arms folded across her chest and her head down.

  19.

  The
lane along the beach extends five miles beyond the canal. I have walked its length. I walked it after Dougal Dalgetty’s widow left with her arms folded and her head down. I had walked it with Gabe on autumn days very much like this one when we talked about books and music and people we passed on the way. And I had walked it when Gabe was away for a few days testifying in Montreal and something happened.

  Gabe and I had argued before he left. I love Montreal and wanted to go with him. He would be gone almost a week. I could go shopping or just stroll through Côte-des-Neiges while he waited to testify. Gabe said no. He was being paid to be there and it was work. He would take me at our expense some other time. I accused him of wanting to chase women while he was there. Wasn’t that what men did, alone in Montreal? Wasn’t it that kind of city?

  The accusation made him angry, as angry as I have ever seen him, and he left in that mood, calming down a little when he called from the airport, but I was still furious and screamed at him before hanging up.

  The next night, he called from Montreal and we had another argument. I drank some Teacher’s, sitting alone, and Mel arrived, and that’s when I said fuck it, or fuck him, who cares? I used the Scotch as an excuse, as a crutch, as whatever name you care to hang on it.

  This is how it started. Mel and I sat staring at each other and talking about nothing until every phrase sounded like a double entendre. When Mel got up to leave, I asked if he would like a kiss goodbye, flirting really, having fun, and he smiled and I walked to him and took his face in my hands and kissed him, open-mouthed. I thought he would say what I did was stupid and stop it, but he didn’t. We were on the sofa, and then we were on the floor and his head was between my breasts with his mouth searching for my nipple and when he found it, when his tongue began circling it, I know I said, “Lick it! Lick it!” aloud, and Jesus …

  I loved it because it was bad and it was wrong, and I hated myself because it was bad and it was wrong, but not as much as I loved it.

  I had not had an orgasm with Gabe for months, but it happened with Mel and then it happened again and again, like a string of damp firecrackers. When it was over, Mel kissed the back of my neck and I told him to get the hell out of my house, and he did.

  And I dreamed about it the following day, walking the length of the boardwalk and sleeping alone in my bed. Dreamed about Mel and me, and I made up with Gabe over the telephone that night, and when he returned I resumed my life of working two days a week at the retirement home and visiting a mother who could offer me wisdom but no spoken words and painting the kitchen and telling myself I was happy with a great guy. But a month later I was at Mel’s apartment in the middle of the day, and we didn’t even get undressed this time because I wore this wide denim skirt …

  The third time was all my idea. Gabe was attending a police course in New York. The subject was interrogation techniques. I called Mel and said, “One more time,” and he said, “Where?” and I said, “Not here and not at your place. Pick a motel somewhere.”

  Fantasies. That’s what I wanted. A savings account of fantasies I could draw from after my next birthday, when I turned forty-one. Turning forty hadn’t upset me. It was a cosmic joke. Everybody made jokes about turning forty. Turning forty-one was scary, serious.

  In the shower, with the water running. That’s the fulfilled fantasy. Mel and me, standing in the shower, warm water flowing over our bodies, and moving, moving until he moaned. Then we dried each other off, I dressed and left. It happened and it was over. Three strikes. I was out. Two months later Gabe was dead.

  Did Gabe know about Mel and me? I was afraid he did.

  Yes, he could, I began to think. Yes, he could have been angry enough to shoot me and then perhaps to shoot himself. Yes, he could have grown so despondent when I didn’t arrive that he could commit suicide just to stop the pain he was feeling. Yes, I might have killed him in that manner that lovers kill each other by turning away a head, withdrawing a hand, ignoring a word.

  If I could believe that, and I felt the idea begin to embed itself within me while I walked the beach strip on that late summer’s afternoon, perhaps I could relax somewhat. The universe, as a great man once said, was unfolding as it should. Gabe was dead, Honeysett was dead, Dad was dead. Mother, Tina, and I were alive.

  That was all I knew. I sat on a bench alongside the boardwalk and stared out at the lake while tears coursed down my cheeks and people glanced at me as they passed, a sad woman staring at the water, waiting for the cormorants to return.

  He killed my husband. That’s what Dougal Dalgetty’s widow said. She believed Gabe had killed her husband. Impossible.

  I wiped the tears from my eyes, rose off the bench, and found the nearest pathway from the shore to Beach Boulevard. Across the boulevard and two blocks away, I saw the upholstery shop in the small two-storey frame building and walked toward it. How dare this woman, in her mourning and sadness, claim Gabe was a murderer. Had she been telling other people the same thing, walking up and down the beach strip, telling lies about my husband?

  I know nothing about upholstering. I’m a slipcover kind of person, I guess. If it’s stained, wash it. If it’s torn, mend it. If it’s ugly, cover it. So I have no idea if the upholstery business is profitable or not. Based on what I could see of Beach Upholstery, it was not. The display windows were crammed with dead and dying plants, although given the amount of grime on the window, the state of each plant’s health, not to mention its species, was difficult to determine. Lights shone from inside the shop, but I saw nothing moving, nor did I hear the tapping of a hammer or the whir of a sewing machine. I had never seen anyone enter or leave the upholstery shop either. But a cardboard sign on the front door, its upper left-hand corner dirty and worn from, I assumed, decades of being turned over at the beginning and end of each day, declared it open.

  I had no need for upholstery. It was the door beside the shop I wanted, the one with a mailbox on one side, a doorbell on the other, and 212A above it. I pushed the doorbell button, heard a satisfying ring inside and shoes descending the stairs. A latch clattered, a bolt slid aside, and the door opened on Dougal Dalgetty’s widow’s worn face, remaining that way just long enough for me to place a hand against it and prevent her from closing it.

  “I need to talk to you,” I said.

  She moved behind the door and began pushing it, but I was already through the opening and inside the small foyer at the foot of the stairs.

  “Please talk to me,” I said.

  She closed her eyes, then turned and began walking slowly up the stairs, and I followed her into the three rooms that appeared to be her world.

  I had expected antimacassars, splintery furniture, and worn carpets. Instead, I stepped on thick broadloom beneath several pieces of good-quality oak furniture. There were interesting prints on the walls, and lovely ceramic lamps cast a warm light in the room. An oak-mantled fireplace filled one corner. In another corner a Persian cat stood up, stretched and yawned, blinked in my direction, and walked off toward the kitchen in a manner that was clearly a rebuke.

  “You want some tea?” Mrs. Dalgetty asked, avoiding my eyes. She was wearing the same pink cardigan and tartan slacks.

  I told her no and thanked her. She appeared relieved. I asked if I could sit down. She said, “Sure,” and I chose a tweed loveseat. “Didn’t Wayne Honeysett live around here?” I asked.

  I had meant it as a conversation starter. Mrs. Dalgetty took it as a threat. She stepped back, looked out the window toward the steel mills on the bay, and shook her head. “I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to him,” she said.

  “But he did live near here, didn’t he? On one of the side streets?”

  “What do you want?” She was biting her bottom lip, looking at the floor, at her worn nails, everywhere but at me.

  “I wanted to ask about something you said when we met this afternoon. About my husband, and your husband.”

  Her head remained in constant motion, even after she settled herself in a
leather armchair. When she said nothing, I went on.

  “You said my husband killed your husband. Why did you say that?”

  “Because he did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know, that’s all.”

  “But who told you that?”

  She shook her head from side to side.

  “You know my husband is dead,” I said.

  A change of direction. She nodded her head once.

  “They think he committed suicide. The police do. I don’t think he did, but I don’t know. I don’t think my husband was capable of killing anyone, including himself.”

  She looked directly at me for the first time and, as I had seen when we met on the boardwalk, the remnants of her beauty were visible. She had pretty eyes.

  “Mrs. Dalgetty,” I said, “we have both lost our husbands recently, and I’m sure your husband’s death was as devastating to you as mine was to me—”

  “Glynnis,” she said. “My name is Glynnis.”

  “That’s a lovely name,” I said. “Thank you. And I’m Josie. Josephine, actually, but—”

  “Wayne Honeysett was murdered,” she interrupted. “Somebody crushed his head under the bridge. Didn’t they? That’s what everybody around here says.”

  I told her yes, that’s what I thought. It was horrifying to imagine it, but I believed that’s what happened.

  “And if your husband didn’t commit suicide and somebody killed him,” she said, “were they all murdered by the same person? Your husband and my Dougal and Wayne?”

  “Then you knew him. You knew Wayne Honeysett.”

  She nodded and stared out the window. “We grew up together. We were kids here on the beach strip. Wayne had his problems. He wasn’t perfect.” She smiled, looked down, and straightened the front of her cardigan. “He was kinda nice-looking, and he liked me. He knew me when I was young, and he liked me because he thought I was pretty. And I was. Not beautiful, maybe. Just pretty.” She opened her cardigan, revealing a small silver brooch in the shape of a peacock, with a green stone for its eye, pinned to her blouse. “He gave me this because he liked me. It’s white gold. The stone is an emerald. A real emerald.”