by Maria Flook
Then Fritz’s eyes started to flutter. Willis talked to Fritz. “Federico,” he shouted. “Federico, look at me. Look at me. Stop dicking around—”
Fritz’s face turned pale and shocky. It went blank. His friend’s lost face triggered a final commitment from Willis. He swam away from the truck and stumbled up the bank. He looked for the Crouton, but it wasn’t where he thought. He thrashed the weeds, twisting at the waist, swiping his arms left and right through the silver grass until he found the dinghy. He seized the glossy oar from where Fritz had stowed it neatly under the bench; the oar felt like a toothpick. He waded back to the truck and tried to pry the barrels apart using as much leverage as he could get with the oar. He felt the cement cylinders shift a little, not enough to make a difference. The oar snapped. Willis took a breath and sank underwater. He leaned against the door jamb and kicked the barrel with his legs. His strength was cut in half in the heavy water; it was like kicking through a chain-mail curtain. He surfaced again and stood on the rocker panel of the sinking truck. He kept his hand under Fritz’s chin, keeping Fritz’s face steadied above an almost imperceptible swirling which signaled that the truck might still be settling.
He couldn’t tell if Fritz was breathing. Willis pressed his face to Fritz and tried to detect his struggle for oxygen. Fritz wasn’t relying any longer on an exchange of air. Willis made a production trying to administer mouth-to-mouth. His busy efforts seemed to awaken Fritz. Fritz came back and forth from that other territory. Back and forth from the almost dead to the almost living.
Holly had seen what happened and had run up to a house to call Rescue. She came back to the car and stayed clear of the spectacle when the grassy bank lit up with floodlights and the optical tingle of emergency flashers. Men in slickers swarmed over the bank. Willis sat in the weeds, shell-shocked. Someone wrapped a white blanket across his shoulders. In minutes, a team freed Fritz using a winch harness and boom on an Exxon tow truck. They brought Fritz on shore and stabilized his spine in a neck brace, then transferred him to a stretcher. Willis weaved back and forth beside his friend. He lifted Fritz’s hand, but the paramedics made Willis drop it. Holding Fritz’s hand could jar the spinal column. Willis was reluctant to obey the icy instruction to let go, as if his bond with Fritz might be irreparably severed.
The emergency workers predicted that it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Fritz might have a crushed sternum. One lung was collapsed, but Fritz wasn’t going to die. Willis wanted to go along with Fritz to Newport Hospital, but the questions started coming at him.
He faced the uniforms and snapped into a different role. He said that he didn’t know anything about the truck; he was driving by in his own vehicle when he saw the accident happen. He saw the driver was in trouble and he had tried to assist. He cooperated with the officers and walked over to Rennie’s sedan in order to fish out his license and registration. When he reached the car, Willis got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. He cut away before the police had decided whether they were supposed to go after him.
Holly had watched the exchange from the levee knoll above the reservoir, and she started walking off in the dark. Willis circled around and saw her figure flare up in his headlights. It was Holly’s distinctive gait—half childlike, half feral. He pulled the car over and she sat down in the seat beside him. “You’re getting good at this,” he told her.
“Fight or flight,” she said. “There’s only those two options.”
The storm was coming in. A raw, relentless blow which might have encouraged some people to dip into their kindling bucket and “make a fire,” and have a cozy situation. When they came back to the house, Holly flicked on the kitchen light to find that a leak had pooled rainwater on the linoleum.
Willis said, “When it’s coming at an angle, the rain creeps under the bald spots in the shingles.” Holly found the mop while Willis went upstairs to get his dry clothes. He was shivering as he talked to her, but she couldn’t tell if it was the cold or a complete nervous exhaustion.
“You need to get in the bath,” she told him.
“No time. They’ll be over here as soon as they scratch their heads for a while.”
“Take a hot shower at least.”
“I’ll do that when I’ve got her home.”
Holly had forgotten. She had forgot about Rennie.
Holly didn’t think she could survive another reckless hour added to that day. She snapped at Willis, “Do you think I can do another thing tonight?” She couldn’t give a fiber more of herself to any cause or stray kitten. Then she saw she was being selfish. “Maybe you should get Rennie tomorrow, after some rest.”
“There’s no rest period. There’s no time-out in hell,” he told her.
She was tired of his same morbific tune and she didn’t want to humor it. She climbed the stairs behind him. “You’ll need your wits to take her out of there. Look at you. You look like a drowned rat. You look,” she waited to find the courage, “like a white punk on dope.”
He turned around on the stairs and offered her a tight smile; his cold lips were blue like the silvery skin on Italian plums.
“Look at yourself!” she scolded him. He looked so pathetic, she changed her tune. “You’re going to freeze to death in those wet jeans.”
“I need to call the hospital about Fritz,” he said.
“I’ll call while you fix yourself a bath.”
Holly talked to someone at Newport Hospital who wouldn’t release information. “Why not?” Holly said into the telephone. “What if I’m his sister?”
Holly dialed again and talked directly to the nursing station in Emergency. The nurse reassured her that no one who had been admitted that night was in a mortally serious condition.
Willis was sitting in the claw-foot tub in the third-floor bathroom. Holly leaned over him and swished the hot water back and forth with a facecloth. “Shit, Willis, this is too hot, you don’t even know it. You’re schmecked!” She twisted the cold-water tap and added more water. She went into his bedroom and came back with the radio. She hadn’t heard too much singing from Willis lately. Singing phrases from old songs was a stress-relieving mechanism for Willis, but she hadn’t heard a peep from him. He was losing any tiny bit of charm he might have once possessed. She told him, “Sing that Bobby Darin thing.”
“Which one?”
She was holding the radio, looking for an outlet. “You know, the one I like.” She started to sing it. Her voice was wan and fetching. “There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder, and it fits me like a glove. There’s a rainbow ’round my shoulder—” She looked at him. Her eyes were rainy. “That one.”
“Christ,” Willis said. He didn’t start singing. “Don’t drop that thing in here,” Willis told her, eyeing the dangling cord.
“You want music don’t you?”
She rotated the dial. It was set on the weather band, receiving NOAA Weather Radio, which announced the strength of the storm. The gale wasn’t as severe as the “Storm of the Century,” but they were calling it its little sister. The storm was mostly in the form of sleet and rain, but the sleet clattered like tacks across the gables as if a team of roofers were driving nails.
Willis couldn’t separate the image of Noah, the ark builder, from NOAA, the acronym for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He had always found the similarity reassuring when he listened to the weather reports with Rennie.
That night, a dragger was late coming into the State Pier. The Glamor Girl with four crew aboard was caught in rough seas.
“Rennie wouldn’t like to hear that,” Holly said.
“She wouldn’t like to hear it, but she’d glue her ear on it,” Willis said. “She’d listen all night.”
Willis spent many storms sitting beside Rennie at the kitchen table as she tracked the movement of a particular squall and any member of the fleet that might be caught offshore. She’d get out her Loran-C chart for George’s Bank and Nantucket Shoals and look for herself. If there hadn�
�t been an actual distress signal, she’d mark where they sent their last VHF radio, their LORAN numbers with their line of position, and from the last LOP intersect she’d estimate where the trouble might have happened.
The Glamor Girl was steaming back from Cultivator Shoals. Willis wondered if maybe their LORAN antenna had snapped in the gale or spray had shorted the console. With zero visibility and no LORAN, a ship can be turned around. Perhaps they decided to run ahead of the storm and had moved out of range and couldn’t use their VHF. If the missing ship was disabled somewhere within the Boston Harbor traffic lanes or local safety fairways, another trawler might happen on them. Most likely they were steaming out to avoid the swells, that’s what everyone always hoped.
Holly and Willis listened to the weather statement until it finished its tape loop and repeated the same information. “Storm Warning in effect. Seas building fifteen to twenty-five feet. Northeast wind fifty knots with gusts. Water temperature thirty-six degrees.”
Holly punched the radio band to FM. It was “Eric in the Evening.” Again, Willis had missed its signature theme, which was all he ever wanted to hear, but Willis told her to keep it on the next song, an astonishingly mournful flügelhorn doing the mellow lines of “Make Someone Happy.”
Holly kneeled on the tile and leaned her elbows on the graceful ivory lip of the old tub. She rested her head against her arms. Willis sat forward to kiss her. His lips invited her and they kissed long and sorrowfully.
They sat like that until the water was tepid and Willis looked pink and sleepy. He stood up dripping and Holly handed him a towel. He scrubbed it over his legs and arms just as they heard a racket at the front door. A couple of voices rolled off terse salutations, official jargon of some kind, and the door burst open.
“The police—” Willis said.
Suddenly, glass was crashing. The Fresnel lens must have been jostled from its perch in the parlor. The hull of glass hit the floor and shattered. After that surprise, Holly and Willis were astonished to hear a quite perplexing and unprofessional peal of laughter. It was Munro.
Willis whisked into his bedroom and grabbed his wet jeans. “I have to get out of here, now. Can you handle this?”
Holly looked at him and tipped her face up and down in a terrified affirmative. He yanked bureau drawers open looking for a sweatshirt. Holly handed up a dirty sweater from the floor. He pulled on his soggy boots as the visitors started up the stairwell.
They went back into the bathroom and locked the door. “Shit. Do you have keys?” he whispered.
“Keys?” She had her complete set of rings for the summer cottages, that was all.
“The freaking car keys are downstairs—”
“Mine too,” she said.
“Well, that’s perfect. He looked around the bathroom. “Listen, pretend you’re in the bath,” Willis whispered. “Then meet us at Neptune’s later on.”
“Neptune’s? You’re going to Neptune’s?”
“It’s changeover Saturday. Isn’t that it? Changeover Saturday?” Willis said.
His connection thrilled her.
Willis was sifting through the linen shelf, throwing the towels on the floor. “Where’s the cube?” he said. “Jesus Christ. That Carl Smith. He’s pinched it all.”
“You’re kidding? Carl took your dope?”
He was weaving on his feet, having a difficult moment assimilating the bad news.
At the same time, the visitors were attempting to lift the bathroom door off its hinges.
Willis went to the other end of the bathroom and started tugging the storm door. What had always served as a budget picture window was again revealing its lifelong potential as an emergency exit. He jerked the handle. He forced it, tearing it loose from its rusty tacks. The wind whipped the thin Plexiglas panel wide open. He looked into the black rain. Below him, at the rear of the house, there was nothing but puny treetops, two peaked maples and a sweep of wind-torn olive shrubs. In the driveway, it was Munro’s Vista Cruiser.
It was Munro bringing in the second-shift constables like he had promised. Willis heard them outside the bathroom door, fussing with the antique lock.
Willis looked back at Holly, he was grinning madly.
“You can’t jump from this high—” she told him.
Willis leaned out the mystical opening in the wall. The rain churned in a glassy horizontal weft. He reached for the silver fabric, as if seizing a curtain tassel. He sailed from the third floor. Willis fell clean of the building. He landed on the olive bushes, which tossed him again, then rolled him off awkwardly, like from a circus net. Holly leaned out the open door and saw that Willis was running off favoring his leg, but he was all right. He was already pedaling Rennie’s three-wheeler around the back of the duplex, skirting the vinyl flags of the Invisible Fence. Holly recognized the Vista Cruiser in the driveway as she tugged the storm door shut.
She didn’t much feel like facing Munro.
She tore her clothing free and stepped into the chalky water. She was lathering soap when Munro and Dr. Kline walked in. She covered her nipples with her soapy forearm. Holly couldn’t believe it. Dr. Kline said, “Holly. We’re here to make a drug intervention. Do you understand? Where is he?”
“You’re doing what?”
“An intervention.” Dr. Kline handed her a towel.
“I see. You have a fancy word for bossing people around,” Holly said.
When Holly was dressed, she sat down at Rennie’s kitchen table, Munro and Dr. Kline across from her. “No, I haven’t seen Willis all afternoon. I was at the station with you, Dr. Kline,” she said with a little vinegar. “Remember?”
“Come on, Holly.”
“I was with you and that detective and everyone else. Why are you pinging me about Willis? I don’t manage Willis.”
Holly told them she wasn’t going to be pleasant about it any longer, she was writing everything down, making a list for her lawyer.
“When did you get yourself a lawyer?” Munro said.
“Well, shit. Today’s Saturday, you know.”
Dr. Kline said, “Holly, you have every right to be upset.”
“No shit.”
“Pretty upset, huh?” Dr. Kline said.
“What do you think?” Holly said. She crossed her arms and leaned back in her chair.
Dr. Kline said, “You were doing fine until you came over here and met this fellow Willis Pratt. I don’t think you understand the dynamics. There’s a lot happening here. Was that a stolen truck? Was that hazardous waste he dumped in that reservoir—”
“Excuse me?” Holly said. She bit her little fingernail. She had no idea that Easton Pond, that grubby algae hole, was the city reservoir. She didn’t think twice about the barrels Willis had used to weight the InstyPrint truck. Now the world of events was rotating on a greased axis. She felt a little confused, but she shoved the cuffs of her sleeves over her wrists and knitted her fingers together on the tabletop. She regained her composure. “I don’t follow you. How is that germane to my situation?”
Holly’s tone surprised Dr. Kline, and her penciled eyebrows lifted and froze in a thin double arch, like a seagull silhouetted against an horizon. She told Holly, “What about checking into the Stopover Shelter for a few days?”
“You’re kidding. The Stopover Shelter? The SOS house downtown?”
“It might be a safety measure for you until this resolves itself.”
“I’m not going to that flophouse for battered women. You want me to go in there with all those sad stories? Do I look battered?”
“Sometimes our bruises are on the inside.”
“Oh, Christ.”
Munro said, “I warned her about Willis.”
“Who gives you the right to warn me? What are you doing here anyway in Carole’s Vista Cruiser?” Holly hissed the four syllables, Vis-ta Cruis-er, showing her disdain for its undeniable suburban resonance. “Where’s your sports car, that red one?”
“The wagon is the family car.
This weekend I’m involved in family business. I guess you’re family now.”
She wondered what claim to her he was making. “Are you through yet?” she said to Dr. Kline. “I don’t have to sit here all night?”
“Did I get my message across?”
Holly told Dr. Kline that she understood. She was supposed to steer clear of Willis Pratt.
Munro added, “Honey, you’re linked to a stolen truck, toxic waste, and maybe or maybe not that big old fire in town. I’d say you better cherish your days on the street.” He was trying to rattle her but she wasn’t whimpering yet. He reached under the table and pinched her knee. He kept his hand cupped on her knee. She felt its heat through the denim. She suddenly realized that her delinquent behavior might be a turn-on to Munro. He might wait there forever, with his hand on her, until she agreed to do a little horizontal dancing. She pried his fingers off her leg and stood up. She took the broom from the kitchen closet and went into the parlor. She swept the broken Fresnel lens into the dustpan. The glass brushing against the thin tin plate made quite a racket. The gorgeous glass was scattered everywhere in tiny chlorophyll chunks and flowerets.
Chapter Twenty-three
Willis pedaled the oversized tricycle along the Cliff Walk. He was pumping hard. He reached through Rennie’s plastic flowers and grabbed the handlebars dead center to get the greatest traction. He remembered the line from a pop song: “You say plastic flowers never die, but I say plastic flowers never live—”
