“Hey,” Mark says to Mona.
“Hey,” I say too.
Mona walks over to the side of the bridge.
“What up?” But she doesn’t sound that easy. She wants it to be light and easy, all of us meeting on the bridge.
It’s not.
How could it be?
And whatever made us all come here at once isn’t going to be talked about. ’Cause we all know, and there ain’t no way of getting past it. It’s all about Red, and nothing we do from now on can change any of it.
Not one damned thing.
15
Mark says when he was in the hospital he had a dream.
He and Red were climbing up a mountain in the rain. Mark wanted to stop and wait out the storm, but Red thought that they should keep climbing because the weather would get worse before it got better.
Mark finally stopped.
Red went on.
Mark is humming a song that I’ve been humming for the past week, and it’s only this morning that I got it out of my head.
I sit next to him and Mona while we swing our feet off the bridge, throwing pebbles that we picked up from beside the road down into the water. And even though we are way above the water, I can see the ripple as the pebbles drop into the current below.
“Damn, that’s a long drop,” Mark says.
Mona blows a bubble and scratches the daisy tattoo on her ankle. Red and her got their tattoos together. He got one on his arm—poison ivy. I wanted one, and Cassie said that if I still wanted one in a couple of years, I could go to it. She hoped I’d get bored with the idea, but I didn’t and sneaked off a few days later and got a dove on my stomach.
Cassie still doesn’t know about it.
“Yeah, it’s making me sick,” Mona says.
“I like it,” I say.
Mona and Mark look at me, then at each other. But they move closer to me when I lean my head over the rails.
Mona says she had a dream last week.
She was standing on the side of a mountain, and as Red reached the top she pulled him the rest of the way to his feet. Red wanted to get out of the storm, but Mona thought the rain felt good against her face, so she told him to go on.
I think about our dreams.
I think about how it would be so easy to sink underneath the railing and dive into the cool water.
Mark says, “It would kill you instantly.”
“You’d be gone before you hit the water, girlfriend,” Mona says.
“I know I could do it. I wouldn’t even get bruised.”
“Don’t ever,” Mona says.
Mark just looks at me real sad and shakes his head.
“It wouldn’t be so bad. I’ve always wanted to high-dive.”
“Well, you can just forget about it, Mike. It’s crazy to want to jump from this height,” Mark says.
“Just like it’s crazy to crash your car into Nemo’s, huh?” I say.
Mark looks out into the ocean and starts humming again. “You know why I did it.”
“I don’t,” I say, ’cause he’s made me mad and he’s treating me like a baby.
“You know, Mike. Don’t say you don’t.”
Mark has tears in his eyes and I’m sorry all of a sudden. Mona looks at me out of the corner of her eye and shakes her head. She leans past me and holds on to Mark’s arm.
It doesn’t make sense, but I feel jealous, for Red. Mona and Mark shouldn’t ever care about each other, because Red is who brought them together.
But Red had left us all.
I get up and start walking down the road.
I turn and see that Mona and Mark are looking at me like I’m about to fall off the bridge. I turn and run, then realize that Mona is running after me.
She catches me, and I remember the first time I saw her run to fly off the vault in gymnastics. I sat next to Red while he looked at her like there was no other person in the world. I remember this and slow down to let her catch me just as I step off the bridge.
She says, “It’s all going to be all right. All of this is only a dream. It’s all just a dream. It’s all just a dream.”
I say, “Is it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Then that’s okay,” I say.
And it is okay as she walks me back to where Mark is standing. There’re wrinkles in his forehead, and I think that maybe he’s in some kind of pain.
Mona starts walking me to her car. Mark follows, squeezing into the backseat after Mona and me have sat in the front seat for about five minutes.
I love the way the ocean smells just around sunset.
In late summer the smell of sunblock and french fries from the Potato Hut on the beach has been blown away by the sea breezes coming in across the Cape, and the sunset is an orange-and-purple, big-sweatshirt, deck-shoes-and-sweet-coffee-at-Bea’s-Diner-to-beat-the-chill-in-the-air kind of thing creeping across the sky.
Mona starts up the car and drives toward the Center of the World—away from the sunset.
I dreamt last night.
I was in a little house in the woods and someone was knocking on the door. When I opened it, Red was standing in the rain. When I told him to come in, he only stood there. When I finally begged him to come in, he turned around and walked off into the dark, rainy night.
16
Mark can’t ever go back into Nemo’s, and he says that’s a shame.
He used to get a bag of clams and three lemons and eat so much he could barely move. Him and Red loved clams.
Clams make me sick, but that doesn’t stop me from going into Nemo’s to get Mark a sack of them. The girl behind the counter, Pritchard Howard’s sister, looks at me strange for a minute, can’t place my face, then hands me the clams. I run before she calls Nemo out front and he ties me to Mark.
Around the corner Mark is sitting on top of Mona’s Malibu.
“Thanks, kid,” he says when I give him the clams.
He throws them down real fast, holding out the sack to me and Mona a few times. We both shake our head and lean against the car.
“These things are good,” Mark laughs, and finishes off the bag. He doesn’t look like the kind of person who just a few weeks ago everyone thought was trying to kill himself.
Even though he wasn’t.
In the hospital when he found out that he was on suicide watch, he laughed at the doctor. So it wasn’t going to matter what anyone thought about him.
I knew that Mark was keeping his part of the deal. He couldn’t go back on his part, ’cause he could never make it up to the person it was made with. He could never make it up to Red.
I am comfortable where I am. Just this very second. Just this very moment. If nothing ever changed and I could stay this way forever, I’d be okay. It’s hard to tell if Mona and Mark feel the same way, ’cause they’re arguing about something I haven’t heard them talking about. In a few minutes, though, they’re laughing and smoking.
Mark looks at me. “What’s wrong, Mike?”
Mona answers for me. “Probably nothing she can talk about.”
She’s right. It makes her put her cigarette out, though. She’s been complaining about her own smoking. She tried to get Red to quit.
“Nasty things,” she says.
“Expensive things,” Mark says, then picks up her half-finished smoke and puts it in his pack.
I’d been thinking about smoking until Red said thirteen was way too young to be so damned suicidal. Then he spent the afternoon blowing smoke in my face.
That was enough for me.
Mark stands up on the hood of the Malibu, pulls out the half-smoked cigarette, lights it, and inhales.
“Hey, you!” Nemo’s seen Mark.
“Yeah,” Mark mutters, and looks over top Nemo’s head.
Nemo walks close to Mark. His hair is silver and he’s one of the tallest people I’ve ever seen. Seven feet easy. He never smiles, but he never hollers at anybody either.
Mark leans back against the Malibu
, favoring his leg. I wish he’d wear shorts more, ’cause I’d like to paint a mural on his cast. I’ve been trying to talk him into it.
Nemo looks at me and Mona and nods before he speaks. “I know you kids have had a hard time. Sorry ’bout that.” Then he looks at Mark real hard. “But that’s no reason to take it out on my store.”
The fish store looks like new now. Better. It smells lemony and clean—probably for the first time since it’s been there.
“I wasn’t taking anything out on your store, Nemo.”
“It just happened, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, Nemo. Just like that.”
Nemo looks at Mark’s leg and arm, then the cuts on his face. “You’re okay now, though?”
“Fine,” Mark says.
Nemo looks at Mark real sad. Mark said once that Nemo and his dad had been in the same class in high school.
“It’s just that you shouldn’t give up, kid. Life can bite. Can’t it? I mean, I know it does.”
Mark listens. He doesn’t try to explain about the deal, about Red, ’cause what would it all mean to anybody but us?
Then Nemo drops his long neck and turns red, like he’s embarrassed that he said anything. Maybe he’s sorry he told us life can suck, like he’s taken our innocence away or something.
Mark limps toward Nemo and pats him on the back, and I think back to a time when I used to feel innocent. A time when I used to feel as young as I am. Mona almost smiles and puts her arm around me as Mark walks Nemo back to his store.
“It’s okay, Mike. It’s all right if they all think like Nemo. We don’t have to explain. They never have to know.”
But it’s just like Mark said; it’s all a shame.
Everything that happened then, and everything that will happen now.
listening
17
Midnight. Pitch black. The moon is hidden behind thick clouds that drew into town today and blocked out the sun everybody was expecting.
The last days of summer … you just have to have bright sunshine. Every little bit of sun makes everybody look up and smile. But it’s black now, and the only way I even know that Mona is sitting on top of her car in our driveway is the red, glowing tip of her cigarette.
I raise my window up real soft ’cause I’m holding beads in my hand and don’t want to drop them. I lean out and inhale salt and thick night air. And since the lights are out all over our house, I can stay with Mona and not worry about her, worrying about me, as I keep her company sitting in my window.
18
A story.
When Red was nine and I was six, we ran away to become fishermen. Really, Red ran away, and by the time he realized I was following him, we had run away, ’cause we were so far from the house that he didn’t want to take me back.
I wish I could remember what made my brother want to run off and be a fisherman. I can’t and sometimes think that if I could, I’d have some kind of clue about every damned thing in the whole wide world. But I can’t remember, so this is just a story.
Frank says we were gone for three days.
Cassie says four, but by the second day they had pretty much drugged her up so much she couldn’t recall anything if she tried.
One of the things I remember, though, is that I took the note that my brother left my parents. On it was a map of where he was going to be a fisherman. Hell, I remember saying to myself that I needed that map in case I couldn’t keep up and got behind. Never thought—until now—how we probably would have been back that night if I’d left the note alone.
But all that didn’t matter, ’cause I was going to be a fisherman just like Red. And Red was going to be a fisherman just like the picture of our great-grandfather, who Red was nicknamed after, hanging in the upstairs hall.
They looked exactly alike. So much so that Cassie used to show everybody who visited the house.
Red always smiled at the picture of the man who had been dead almost one hundred years before he was born. And he used to say, “I’m going to be just like him.”
That’s why he started hanging with Frank and his buddies in Gloucester and with Jo off the Cape.
You’d think with everybody pushing Red along fishing, there shouldn’t have been any reason for him to leave home to do it, but like I said, his running off was for a reason I don’t remember, so it wasn’t about fishing.
So we slept on the beach the first night. We waited for everybody to take their umbrellas and beach towels in, then we put our sleeping bags down on the beach with the duffel Red had stuffed with sardines and saltines.
The moon was full that night, so we didn’t even need the flashlight Red had brought. I remember how Red tucked me into his sleeping bag and went to sleep with his Walkman in his ears beside me. He never yelled at me for messing up his new career or slowing him down.
Two things happened that night.
First, the ocean sounded like wild horses running over metal roads and scared me half to death.
Second, the first Red stood at the edge of the water in his slicker and gun boots, watching us as we slept. I knew it was him and told Red in the morning that our great-granddaddy had protected us in the night. I realized later that I never thought to wake my brother up.
I remember that Red smiled at me.
He never told me I was imagining anything or making it up. He just smiled, opened a can of sardines, and told me to eat more than I gave to the gulls. Then we hid the sleeping bag and duffel under one of the houses near us and stayed on the beach the rest of the day. Red fished from the pier with a lot of other kids, and I splashed in the water when I wasn’t sitting next to him.
I remember that the sun was so warm and bright that I fell asleep on the pier beside Red.
I remember that Red had a big iced soda sitting next to me when I woke.
I remember that the fish we didn’t cook on the beach grills we gave to the gulls.
And finally, I remember that kids didn’t tell. When the cops went along the piers and beaches with pictures of us, none of the kids said anything ’cause they knew we were fine, having just shared a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips with us after we’d come from the arcade.
The second night we slept underneath the pines out by the lighthouse, and I could see the light from Caroline’s house. Later she asked me if the light had made me feel better. I just looked at her ’cause how did she know? How did she know?
Old Red came back that night.
He sat on the stump of a tree not fifty feet from me and my sleeping brother. In the almost full moon his molasses, crinkled face smiled at me and mixed with my dreams as I fell into a sleep so deep Red had to shake me awake the next morning.
Running away with a ghost.
When I told Red the old man had come back, he said at least we didn’t have to feed him, then he grabbed my hand and marched me out of the trees to do more all-day fishing.
The large number of summer people made it easy for us to get lost in the crowd. We mixed with their kids and the busloads of people walking along the beaches.
It’s easy to get lost in the summer here, and we did.
I can’t remember who finally turned us in, but I don’t think it was a big surprise or anything to Red. We got taken home by the cops and got to ride in the back and fly through the streets with the sirens blasting.
Frank was standing in the front yard when we pulled up, and after he’d hugged us, he said something about how he hoped this police and siren thing wasn’t foreshadowing our future.
Cassie cried for about three days and didn’t let us out of her sight for the rest of the summer, until Frank said we’d probably leave again if she kept us prisoners.
A little while after that she sent us to the store for bread.
But all this is just to let you know. They’ve been hanging around here for a long time. The ghosts. So it isn’t so unbelievable that they’re around us now.
But I guess not e
verybody would believe what I just said. They’d call it the imagination of a child. A story.
19
I wait for Mark on the front porch of his house, picking dead leaves from the pots he set out earlier this summer. Me and Red watched as he fertilized the soil and potted flowers for hours. Red was almost hypnotized as Mark named each one.
“Soapwort.”
“What?” I jump ‘cause Mark’s walked up on me so quiet that he’s nearly scared me out of my skin.
“That plant is called soap wort. It was my mom’s favorite. She used to put it in pots all over the house. Said she wanted to look at it all the time and she couldn’t do that outside. It’s finished now. Only blooms for a couple of months. I need to take them out of the pots and put them in the rock garden.”
I look at Mark as he limps across the porch and waters something by the front door, and think how everybody is afraid of him. They think he’s some kind of thug who doesn’t have anybody to tell him different.
He’s not, but I think he likes people believing it.
I see his point, ‘cause the world leaves Mark Hollywood way alone.
After a while Mark puts the watering can down and waves me into the house. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a cleaner place in my whole life, except maybe a doctor’s office.
“Want a soda?” Mark says.
I do and sit down on a couch that is so soft it almost swallows me whole. I look at all the framed pictures of Mark from when I didn’t know him so good. He is about three in a picture where he’s sitting on his mom’s lap and smiling into the camera. In the bottom right corner somebody has written “Dublin, Ireland—1986.” His redheaded mother smiles too.
And right next to that picture is an almost identical one of his dad holding him. “New Haven, CT—1986” is written in the corner of that one. Also, “Hollywood Family Reunion.”
Mark says, “See, I really am black Irish,” as he nods at his black-skinned dad and pale white mother, then sets the soda on the coffee table in front of me.
Looking for Red Page 4