Open Water
Page 19
The man said, “I think we’re on different tracks here.”
Rennie turned to Holly. “Is Munro out there in the car?”
Holly said with some finality, “Rennie, this isn’t anything to do with Munro.” Either Rennie had turned a corner and had lost her coherence or she was putting on an act.
She turned to Holly and changed the subject. “Where’s that little pea? The one we got in the mail? I want that pea. It’s driving me crazy.”
“It is? Rennie, you never said you wanted that thing. You really want that pea?” Holly tried to calculate Rennie’s actual level of dementia. She looked at the contractor and looked away.
The man went to the door.
Holly told him that Fritz would sign his paper. Fritz was in the shack. She turned around to see Rennie climbing back upstairs, taking the bannister in both hands, tugging herself up the incline, one riser at a time. Holly asked her if she wanted to call a doctor about her relapse.
“The doctor reports to Munro,” Rennie said.
“We can get a different doctor if you need something.”
“If I need something, she says.”
Rennie’s irony was stinging. Holly followed Rennie upstairs, thinking it was unfair when Rennie talked like this. Her own father, as he faced death, would never have been so acid—if he could have talked in his last days—but Rennie was smiling at her now. She was sitting in bed, writing in her doomsday book. Something in huge indigo letters.
Chapter Fifteen
Paint fumes had collected in the tiny garage and the men were feeling sick. Holly opened the plank doors and braced them with old cement blocks to ventilate the shack. “You idiots,” she said. They dropped their arms and watched her until she was finished scolding. Willis told her to stand in the doorway to keep a lookout.
“Is Showalter coming over here? He says you make life difficult for everyone,” Holly complained to Willis.
“Forget him,” Willis said. But Willis wasn’t sure if Munro had squawked to the police about the truck. Munro might keep it to himself for a while and use it as an ace later on. Willis understood how a snitch might savor his opportunities.
Fritz was watching the puppy learn the limits of its environment. Once or twice, they heard it yip if it edged over the Invisible Fence. It fell back on its haunches and tipped its head sideways as if it was examining its situation. Nicole’s children looked forlorn until Fritz explained that the row of flags didn’t prevent them from playing with the dog as long as it stayed in its ghost corral.
“It’s not going to learn if they keep lifting it out.” Willis told Fritz. “You throw your money around, you know that?”
Holly watched them work on the truck. The InstyPrint lettering kept floating up. Random words reappeared through the dark coat. The truck looked like a Magic 8 Ball where psychic warnings surface.
“This doesn’t cut it,” Willis said. He backed up and crossed his arms. He didn’t seem very concerned. He wasn’t really interested in disguising the truck or driving the truck to New Jersey. Holly saw that Willis liked marking the van the way dogs kick dust to cover their waste. He was happy just to defile it.
“Point,” Fritz said. “It’s black, isn’t it? We leave here at dark. It will blend right in with the night. Shit, this is a fucking night-mobile if I ever saw one.”
Willis said, “Let me ask you. Who’s on the highway at night? Swarms of cruisers. Our two taillights all by their lonesome look sweet as cherry Life Savers. The paint won’t even be dry on this thing.”
“The wind will dry it.”
“I say we wait another day and apply a second coat.”
Fritz agreed to postpone the trip.
“You know what we have? We have an Insty hearse.”
Fritz was laughing with the same recognition. Fritz was right there, at the same mental spot. Willis sometimes wondered how they arrived there together like that.
Holly didn’t join in. “I don’t see what’s so comical. Let’s see how you two pull it off before you laugh it up. Get rid of the thing, then you can try out for Late Night.”
Willis and Fritz had never been successful with any scheme. Despite their brotherhood, or whatever it was that gave them a boost of telepathy and kept them united, they had never once turned a profit.
At sixteen, they had tried to sabotage a rubber-duck race, a fund-raising event for a capital campaign at Newport Hospital. The hospital sold rubber ducks representing chances on a sports car. The race was held at the Newport Country Club. A lively freshwater stream threaded the golf course through dense pitch pine and beach plum. Willis thought he and Fritz could sneak into the underbrush, hide out, and defraud the hospital.
They waited in the undergrowth before dawn. A cold dungeon t’ick moved in from Brenton Point; the fog coiled their hair and water dripped down their cheeks. At daybreak the greenskeepers rode machines over the course, vacuuming up the condensation from the short grass. One of the workers started whacking the thicket with an iron. He sliced the golf club through the branches over their heads with little regard for the sports equipment until Willis and Fritz emerged and he chased them off the golf course.
While the men painted, Holly discovered boxes of shiny beads and enamel buttons, plastic rosettes and hollow beans, white discs with rolling black poppyseed pupils, a thousand tiny doll’s eyes. Rennie’s jewelry supplies, beside the doomed truck, added to the desolate feel of the shack. It was like a Warehouse of the Damned. Holly’s mother had saved old buttons like these in a glass jar. Each button was singular, unique, lost from its set. They were saved in hopes of one day matching up with their likeness, their own kind. Other than the small, white, interchangeable shirt buttons, most were never claimed. They were artifacts. Every artifact represented a specific family member, and all of these members, like the buttons, were estranged from the rest.
She stacked the boxes against the garage wall and went outside. She leaned against the door and listened to the men bicker over the gallon of paint. She slid down the side of the plank door and rested on her heels. She saw someone coming up the driveway.
She recognized him immediately, it was her ex-husband, Jensen.
Jensen was wearing his shearling coat. After all these years, he had dug it out of the closet. He was wearing the coat to motivate Holly, she knew he didn’t wear it for his health.
“Shit,” she told Willis. “Look who it is. It’s that no-neck back from Kanpur.” She was trying to make light of it, but her nerves were jittering. She wanted Willis to come out there and take stock of it.
Willis walked out of the shack to take a look.
Jensen called to Holly, “Hello, you.” He walked right over to their circle and slapped his two hands down on Holly’s shoulders. He kissed her forehead. “Missed you a little bit,” he told her. His shearling coat looked small on him. He might have gained some bulk since they were first married.
Jensen said, “Jesus, I heard about what happened to our old apartment. That sinkhole. Weird—”
She looked at him. She imagined that he was insinuating something.
“Well, Holly. I’m glad you found yourself a new place.” He didn’t look impressed.
“Where’s Sarojini?” Holly said.
“Setting up.”
“Where would that be?” She hoped it was off the island.
No such luck.
Jensen said, “We’ve got a nice spot on Catherine Street. Sycamore House. It’s kind of an investment property.”
“What about your Carvel franchise?”
“I’m still there for now, but I’m not staying there forever.”
“You finally got tired of dishing up soft serve? You bought that big place? That mansion they turned into apartments? She give you Indian money for that?” Holly said.
Willis said, “I know that place. That’s a busy chicken ranch. Vaseline on every doorknob.”
Jensen said, “It was in the wrong hands. We’re renovating. We’re gutting it.”
“Why aren’t you at your Swami ice cream shop?” Willis said.
Jensen turned around to face Willis. “Who’s asking me questions?”
“This is my neighbor.” She kept his name to herself. “And, that’s Fritz.” She pointed to Fritz who looked pretty awful, like a Hollywood punk. He was wearing a new pair of skintight jeans, like he had just robbed them off the rack. “You can memorize their pretty faces and clear off.”
She walked back inside the shack and Jensen followed her in there. He started telling her that he had come to a realization. He said he realized that a girl didn’t burn up a bed without there being a trace of feeling left in her heart. He told her that he had come to appreciate that, and he wanted to tell her she wasn’t alone. “I’ve got a speck of emotion for you too, girl. I guess it clings for a while.”
“Sorry to hear that. It can cling to the bitter end,” she said, “but I don’t feel anything.”
He picked up her hand and rubbed his knuckles over it. He dropped it again.
“What the fuck do you want? You want something, I know it,” Holly told him.
“Thing is. I heard Neptune’s for sale. I might want to buy it. I wanted to be the one to tell you. You wouldn’t want to hear that news from a stranger.”
Holly looked at Jensen. She knew that he wasn’t telling her the truth. She knew when Jensen was lying, his lips looked tight, as if a smile was fighting at the corners.
“Salvatore hasn’t said a word about this to me. I say you’re full of bullshit.” Yet she felt her heart pounding. Her summer job was the glue on her calendar; the other months tore away in the wind. Holly figured that Jensen was alarmed to see Willis and had come up with something to get her in a lather, something to provoke her. Holly said, “I say the day you buy Neptune’s, I go down on the beach and part the sea.”
“You can still have your job. We’ll keep you on.” Jensen pressed his thumb against the glossy truck. It left a little print on the wet finish, intricate as a scarab.
“I’m through listening to this,” she started talking so she couldn’t hear him. “We open up in three weeks. Salvatore gave me my keys yesterday. Double sets. We’re ordering two hundred new towels, waffle-weave, all sizes. He’s putting in a washer so we can do our own sheets instead of sending them on the truck. He didn’t mention anything about selling the place to you. That’s a nice fantasy you’re having.”
Jensen said, “Will you calm down? You’re shrieking. You should have your tonsils out, you know that?”
“Are you finished?” she said.
“Holly, I’m just saying I’m going to be your boss.” His smile was running high from one end to the other.
“Fuck off, Jensen.”
Jensen was looking back and forth between Holly and the two men holding the wet brooms. “What have you got here, a chop shop?”
Jensen took a hold of Holly’s elbow and he tried to steer her outside. He had a funny gloss over his eyes, as if he had just peeled onions.
Jensen told her, “Let’s take a little drive together. Old time’s sake. Let’s ride over to Neptune’s—”
“Get serious,” she told him. “You’re not getting any.” She might have been speaking for herself or for Sarojini. Her tone suggested a universal consensus.
Willis didn’t like what he thought was happening and he shoved Jensen out of the shack. Fritz pulled the old cedar plank doors shut and Holly tucked the board into the wooden rests. Jensen knew he was banished and he bowed at the waist, sweeping his arm through the air. He turned and started walking away.
Holly yelled, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.” It was a babyish thing to say, and she enjoyed saying it.
Her ex-husband turned around to face her, shrugged, then kept walking away. She watched him get into an expensive new car fully financed by his Indian connection. He cranked the sun roof a notch to entice the fickle spring sunshine.
“I guess he’s not through with you,” Willis told Holly.
“Please don’t say that. He gives me the creeps.”
“No question about it. He left that calligraphy,” Willis said.
“What calligraphy?” Fritz said, letting the garage door swing open again.
“Nothing,” Holly said. She didn’t want to talk about it. She thought Fritz had a funny look. He was almost smiling. As much as she knew about Fritz, she wasn’t sure if it was Jensen who wrote those two silver words.
Fritz dribbled mineral solvent onto Willis’s hands as he rubbed a rag over his knuckles, then Fritz took the rag and Willis splashed the solvent onto Fritz. Except for the harsh fumes of the petroleum distillate, it looked like a loving anointment of some kind. Afterward, their hands looked clean, but Willis’s cast was spattered, a loose spray of black paint like watermelon seeds.
Chapter Sixteen
If she sat on the radiator by the window, Rennie could see the channel off Brenton Point. She folded a velour towel over the uncomfortable plumbing ribs and she had a warm, pleasant seat from which to look out. She removed a pair of German binoculars from a leather case. She lifted them in one hand to watch, but she was having trouble squinting through the lenses. The magnifications were off. She turned the focus one way and turned it back; she found something. A dragger was steaming in, just west of Elbow Ledge. She saw its doors hanging, stowed on the gallus. The bridle and towing warps were winched tight on the net reel, still puddling underneath. She was steaming into State Pier Number Nine, or into Parascondola’s, where lumpers swarmed on board to sort and offload the catch for the processors. Rennie thought of Bill Hopkins on the Teresa Eve coming back loaded to the rails with nary any freeboard left, her skipper a fool for money. She looked back at the water and followed the dragger stem to stern to see if she could identify its skipper or any of its crew. There was one man working on deck, cutting through a fouled piece of net and laying it in strips. Two crew stood outside the pilothouse, gripping mugs of coffee or maybe it was Cup-a-Soup. Sonny Costa had changed to soup when too much dragger coffee had his stomach acting up. Then Sonny quit taking instant soup on board because the MSG made his fingertips tingle. After all his caution over what he fixed himself in the galley, she blew right out of the water.
Rennie was surprised to discover that she couldn’t tell if the boat she watched was coming in or going out. She rubbed her thumbs into her eyes and watched again. The boat seemed to waver, drifting above, then below the horizon line. Her eyes were acting funny. When Rennie used to watch a boat come in, she could almost always identify its crew, and she could see it in their faces if the trip had been worth it or not.
She pressed the glasses against her eyes until the bridge of her nose started to ache. The boat started to hopscotch across the water. She didn’t know if she was losing her mind or just losing her vision. She shuffled back to her bed across the room, hardly making headway. She shoved one foot ahead of the other, afraid to lift her feet from the floor. Normal ambulation had become precarious. The floor shifted like a porch glider. She got back into bed and pulled the sheet over her knees. Rennie started to recognize that the transition wasn’t going to be an easy thing, after all.
At one o’clock, Willis brought her a bowl of cream of chicken soup with a dollop of sherry. She was grateful for the mild chicken scent, which transformed the room. He sat beside her and made sure she swallowed it all. Willis looked splattered with tar and she asked him if he’d been riding the roller again, or did they have him raking.
“Rennie, I don’t have that job anymore. Remember? I’m driving at WASTEC now.”
“You’re not tarring roads?”
“A long time ago. I didn’t much like it.”
“That’s right. Tar has a bad smell.” She seemed to be thinking hard. Perhaps she was imagining the acrid scent of tar when she sat up straight in bed and projectile-vomited. Her chicken soup laced wi
th sherry shot across the covers. Willis stood up and looked at what had happened. It was one of the first times anything like this had occurred in his presence and it took him a minute to act. Rennie flopped back against the pillow and groaned. Willis collected her feather comforter where the vomit had pooled. He took the quilt into the bathroom and put it in the bathtub. He didn’t know if he should wash it or if it should be saved for the dry cleaner. He made a final decision and ran the shower over it, then he shook it out and took it to the hall window. He pushed it through the window and shut the sash on its tail. It luffed on the wind like a huge, swollen sail. He went back into the bathroom and moistened a washcloth and took it back to Rennie. She was lying on her side, her knees drawn up, her arms around her ankles. He touched the washcloth to either side of her mouth. She had vomited with such force, her lips weren’t even soiled.
“I’m having a little bit of pain,” she told him.
“I’ll get a doctor for you. Who do you want me to call? Do you want to go the hospital?”
“None of the above,” she said.
“What doctor do you want?”
“Ask me tomorrow. Maybe that suicide doctor.”
Willis said, “Rennie, please don’t joke.”
“That suicide doctor? I think he’s a scream.”
“How about your morphine?”
“Now, tell me, if I’m pudding from the waist up for very long, who’s going to watch this place?”
“What needs watching?”
Rennie sighed and pulled herself up on her elbow. “Do me a favor. Pick up my binocs and see what’s out there. I think it was the Christy and Roland. She’s worse for wear, but I was glad to see her. Look about two o’clock, west of Elbow.”
Willis went to the window and twisted the binoculars. He told her, “Flat calm. Flat as a plate. Everyone’s out. Lots of privateers seeing what they can do. Must be mackerel, slews of tinkers this time of year.”