“Oh yeah,” Lee had said, baffled, “I should do that.” He borrowed a pen from the bartender and asked the scholar to spell the word. Lee wrote it, doppelgänger, on a cocktail napkin and tucked it into his pocket. Then the scholar said, “In the myth, it’s sometimes true that the doppelgänger is a menacing figure.”
The woman beside him at the Hurricane bar sipped her wine and turned to face him. “It’s been a long time, but I thought you’d recognize me. I was pretty sure you would.”
Lee looked at the glittering bottles across the bar. For a couple of months now, maybe three evenings a week, he’d found himself sitting at this polished zinc bar drinking something with a paper umbrella in it and watching the sun set memorably. Happy to think of himself as dormant. Waiting to see what the next phase would be. Maybe this woman, Helen Trenam, was that phase.
He had picked the Hurricane for this meeting because it was too loud and too young for anything too serious. It was unlikely that here a meeting with a stranger could get out of hand. He membered Helen Trenam saying she owed him a full and complete explanation. “That day in chemistry,” he said, “you were just messing with me, right?”
“Oh, no,” she said, “far from it. I was as real that day as anything that’s ever happened to you.”
A lot of what had happened to Lee Taylor had been of questionable provenance, but now was not the time to go into that. Now was the time to fall into this woman’s unfathomable brown eyes and drown.
She stared into Lee’s eyes for a while, not blinking, certainly not afraid of anything she saw in them. She set her glass on the bar with a delicate finality. “You’ll see when we talk some more, but not here. Let’s go for a walk on the beach. It’s been awhile since I’ve had sand between my toes.”
Lee found that the prospect of seeing her bare toes, and maybe even more of her, was more than enough to get him up off the barstool, and headed for the elevator.
They walked across Gulf Way and through a gap in the low retaining wall that the city fathers believed would stop a mild tidal surge. Then on down a sand pathway through clumps of sea oats to the beach. It was fully dark now and Venus was rising out of the gulf, her brilliance shaming the pale stars of the early dark. A warm land breeze had begun to blow, and Lee knew it would grow stronger as night deepened. He followed Helen Trenam to the waterline where she leaned down and removed her sandals. Her knee-length turquoise silk skirt ruffled in the wind, and her feet, small and shapely, were the treat Lee had promised himself. She pulled her white cotton blouse from the waistband of her skirt, unbuttoned the bottom of it, and tied the shirttails in a knot, exposing a band of tanned flesh to the night wind. She waved her hand vaguely toward the south, the jetty at the end of the beach, and said, “Let’s walk that way. It’s nice out here tonight, don’t you think?” Her voice was low and calm, strange for a woman who had called a man she had seen only once for a few minutes years ago and asked for a rendezvous.
“Sure, it’s nice, very nice, but, uh, shouldn’t you tell me what this is all about?” Give me that full and complete explanation?
She stopped walking, turned to him, moved close, their bodies almost touching, and gripped his upper arms with her strong little hands. “You’re right. This has been a mystery for too long. That day in chemistry . . . was a cry for help. Didn’t you know that?”
“No, I . . .”
“I was in trouble. I went to you for help, and you didn’t . . . you didn’t do anything.”
Reason failed Lee. What could he say to this? “Why didn’t you say you needed help? What was happening to you?”
“I couldn’t. He was watching. He was there.”
“You said I promised I wouldn’t be there. What did that mean?”
She let go of Lee’s arms and started walking again along the surf line. Lee glanced behind them at her small footprints in the sand.
“I know it’s strange. You must have thought I was crazy.”
“Yeah, I considered that, and that I was too. But I finally decided the best explanation was that you really believed I was some guy you knew. Some guy who had promised not to come. Believe me, I had to work through a lot of possibilities to get to some certainty—I mean, you know, provisional certainty—about that.”
She laughed quietly. “Yeah, provisional certainty. The times we live in, right?”
“Right.” They walked maybe ten paces before Lee said, “So there was this guy who looked, I mean, he looked exactly like me?”
“Oh, yes,” she said quietly, a little shudder in her voice. “There is this guy, and he looks exactly like you.”
“You said is. You said there is this guy.”
“That’s right. I did. Guys like him, they don’t die young. They last, and they keep on doing what they do.”
“What does this guy do?”
“He hurt me. That’s what he did to me, and he liked it. It started when we were in high school, and it just kept happening even though I loved him and he loved me and I tried every way I could to make him stop.”
“Wait a minute. Let’s go back.” But Lee wasn’t sure what to go back to, or how far, or where this might take them. He knew now that he looked exactly like a guy who liked to hurt people. And he knew, he thought he knew, that he was not that kind of guy. So the resemblance was exact only as it pertained to the outsides of two men. Lee had been stupid, for sure, but he had never been a hurter, and especially not of women, unless usually being less than they expected him to be, hoped he was, was hurting them, and come to think of it now, here on this beach, he supposed it was.
“So,” he said, “you’re saying I let you down because I didn’t realize when we were eighteen years old that You promised me you wouldn’t come meant this guy was hurting you?”
“I didn’t say it was fair, I just said it was true.”
“Jesus,” Lee whispered.
“He didn’t help me either. I prayed to him a lot in those days. What I said to you, I said it because he was there, he was watching us. He wasn’t a student. He kept that part of his promise. He never went to school anywhere after we graduated from Leesburg High. And he stayed home and worked on his dad’s farm for a few weeks after I left, but then he followed me. When I said those things to you, I was speaking . . . to a symbol. I saw you the very first day in chemistry, and of course I thought you were him. Then I realized you weren’t, and I thought I could use you to get him away from me. I thought maybe when he knew he had a double, he might take it as, I don’t know, some kind of message.”
“A message?”
“You know, like God or fate or something telling him to get out of my life. Showing him that there was another one of him, a good boy, a boy who wouldn’t hurt me, right there in the same class with me. There by the grace of some power that was bigger than his hurting.”
It had been a long time since anybody had called Lee Taylor a good boy. It hurt him now to realize this. “So you thought I’d do what, say what? I’d somehow . . . decode this message, know I was a symbol, and come after you, find you, and help you?”
“I guess I did. I thought if God had made two of you, He had the power to send you to me. I was desperate. You probably don’t know what that’s like.”
Lee didn’t know. Not really. His life had been a series of jobs he did pretty well but cared little about, a lot of time in bars, a few friends but no one he could depend on in a pinch, and those disappointed women who always saw enough in him to stay for a while, and always saw too little to make it last.
“No,” he said, “I guess I don’t know about that, not really.”
Up ahead Lee could see where two sets of footprints came from the low dunes to their left, went to the waterline, and then headed south the way he and Helen Trenam were going. When they caught up with the footprints, he saw that one set belonged to a man who wore shoes. The other feet were bare and small, a woman’s or a child’s.
“So how did you finally get away from this guy?”
She
said it so quietly that he asked her to repeat it: “I didn’t.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“I mean I’ve been with him ever since, and he’s hurt me one way or another every day of my life. Every day since I appealed to you in chemistry class.”
In spite of his sympathy for this woman, Lee felt that he had to defend himself. “Look, is that really fair? I mean, how could I know what you were saying? What you wanted me to do? And anyway, what did you want me to do? What could I have done back then? I was just a kid. I didn’t know up from down.”
Afraid to look over at her, he saw only the tips of her fingers in his peripheral vision. She was pointing ahead of them at the thin strip of beach by the old jetty.
“Look at that,” she said. “Isn’t that something lying on the beach?”
Lying? “Yeah, I see it. What is it?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t—”
“We have to, now. Now that we’ve seen it. We can’t just turn back.”
“I guess you’re right.”
They walked on, Lee looking down from time to time at the footprints they followed, a man’s and a woman’s, barefooted. When they got close enough to see that it was a man lying on the beach near the surf, his head below his feet, Lee looked back at the four sets of footprints behind him. The two sets of barefooted prints were identical. It’s been awhile since I’ve had sand between my toes.
“Hey,” he said, “I think maybe we ought to—”
Two men stepped out of the shadows at the base of the jetty and walked toward them.
The big one was Frank Dross. The other one was Lee’s double. The man at their feet was obviously dead. Even in the sparse light from a streetlamp on Gulf Way, Lee could see that the man’s face was black from the blood that had run to it because his feet were elevated. Blood leaked from a wound in his chest. Frank Dross drew a gun from the pocket of his brown polyester suit coat. “Hey there, my buddy Lee.”
But Lee was staring at the man who looked exactly like him. It was more than extraordinary. Even in the face of Dross’s gun and with a dead man at his feet, Lee stared, searched for any difference that the years since that chemistry class might have made between himself and this man whose name he didn’t know.
Helen Trenam said, “I brought him.” Her voice sounded tired, not even the smallest revelation of sorrow or guilt or triumph in it. Nothing but the sound of years of hurt.
“We see that,” Lee’s double said. “And we appreciate it.”
Helen Trenam took four steps to the side, as though to get out of the way of something.
Frank Dross pointed the gun at Lee. Lee’s heart shrank to a dead black dot in his chest. It was all he could do to keep from falling to his knees. Somehow, to keep standing was a small victory.
“Well,” Lee’s double said, “we have to hurry. This beach isn’t big enough for four people and a dead man.” Even his voice sounded like Lee’s.
“Tell him, Barry,” Frank Dross said. “He deserves an explanation.”
“I was about to, Frank.” Lee’s double pulled a gun from his back pocket and pointed it at Lee’s chest. “Maybe you’ve already figured this out, Lee. You look exactly like me, and for reasons that don’t really matter to you right now, I had to kill this man here, and a very good way for me to get away with this crime is for you to stay here with him.”
“Stay here?” Lee heard his own voice quaver.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” his double said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? The cops find you here with this guy, and they find two guns, and they figure the obvious.”
Lee’s mind flailed. “But what about those footprints.”
“What footprints?”
“Those, them. All of them.” Lee pointed to the beach behind them, then at the sand along the edge of the jetty where footprints came from Gulf Way. “They’ll know you were here.”
“Correction, buddy. They’ll know somebody was here. They won’t know who. They’ll just figure that some, uh, citizens came upon this unhappy scene and decided not to call it in. You know, the old don’t-get-involved thing. Very common these days.”
Lee’s double pointed his gun at the center of Lee’s chest. Helen Trenam took two more steps to the side. She had seen something like this before.
Lee said, “But I can’t just . . . disappear.”
“You won’t,” his double said. “You’ll be me.”
Lee’s eyes caught the beginning of a flash, and his mind had only the time to say to him, Extraordinary, but you’ll never tell this story.
LOCAL WATERS
by Luis Castillo
Indian Rocks Beach
Abel Rivera had just printed his name on the dry-erase board and was midway through the date when he heard, “Friggin’ homo.”
The marker’s felt tip squeaked to a halt. His back was to the class so he couldn’t say with absolute certainty that he’d been the intended target, but a chorus of “oohs” left little doubt.
He narrowed his eyes and turned to face second-period Intensive Reading. A small class, perhaps a dozen or so students, and every one of them seemed to enjoy the sight of anger on his face. He lingered on a blond, stocky kid with cigar-shaped dreadlocks who was fist-bumping a boy next to him.
Abel picked up the attendance sheet. Right now figuring out who some of these kids were seemed to be a more pressing need than the assignment. Cody Kimball was the kid with the blond dreads. Abel pegged him as a surfer-stoner type and the guy who delivered the homo-blast. An Indian Rocks Beach local himself, he usually fared better with that crowd.
He thought he’d be subbing for Advanced Placement English, but when he showed up this morning at Gulf Beaches High he was informed of a change in plans. Instead, the school secretary assigned him to be today’s floater and sent him off with a class-coverage schedule plus a thin stack of report cards and instructions to pass them out at the end of second period.
He’d been a floater here before. It was an awful assignment, crisscrossing campus after each period only to arrive at the next class moments before the bell, short of breath while searching for anything resembling a lesson plan.
After taking roll he returned to the board and finished writing out the date and assignment. As he hyphenated Section Review 2-2, an object cut through the air. It was a paper ball weighted with a penny inside. He’d been on the receiving end of one of these before. Judging from the force of the throw, the kid who nailed him had an arm.
His eyes raced around the room to get an AP down here pronto, but he’d only stepped inside a few minutes ago and he didn’t know where the call button was. As he scanned for the intercom, he once again locked eyes with Cody Kimball.
The kid met Abel’s gaze and held it long enough to make his point: Prove it.
Abel wanted to respond that this would be countered with a swift, harsh measure.
“Okay, class, let’s not throw things.” He raised the paper ball, shook the penny inside. “Technically, this is battery . . .”
“Nah, dude. A battery hurts way worse.” Cody’s timing triggered another burst of laughter. A couple of kids really put their lungs into it.
Abel’s toes curled. He marched over to Cody. A bored expression spread across the teen’s face. He played with the fluorescent-orange golf tee he’d fashioned into an ear gauge. Abel got to within arm’s reach.
“Look, Cody,” a mild shrill weakened his tone, “I’m going to need a little more respect and cooperation from you if you’re going to be allowed to stay in here. So Cody, this is a yes-or-no question. Are you going to cooperate and not interrupt when I’m trying to explain something?”
“Listen, dude. Let me explain something to you. I don’t like you getting up in my grill. You smell like some bad burrito and I kind of freak when people I don’t know stand close to me.” He sprang from his desk and headed for the door. Near it, he raised both arms and flashed double-V victory signs. “Peace, m
y brothers. I’m out.”
Abel could have sworn he heard epic, owned, how’d that taste, under Cody’s classmates’ breaths.
“Okay. Moving right along,” was his reply. He tried to make this sound light-hearted, but knew it landed like a brick.
A few minutes later he found the intercom, but no referral forms. If he buzzed the office now to inform them that Cody had just dressed him down and walked out of class, they would simply tell him to write the kid up, and he wasn’t about to announce that he didn’t have anything to do that with in front of this bunch.
Cody was out of the class, not a half-bad consolation prize, but Abel was still seething. He slouched behind a computer monitor flanked by file trays and stacks of paper on the teacher’s desk.
Despite his attempts not to, he kept staring at a couple of pictures near the American flag. A brightly colored poster read: Our Kids Are Worth Whatever It Takes. Taped next to that was a piece of notebook paper with a student’s drawing of a dog dropping. It also featured flies with motion-depicting lines and came with an assumed laudatory caption—Mr. Angelo Is the Shit.
He substituted Abel for Angelo and omitted the the when he thought of Saturday and the spring luau at his daughter Emma’s new school.
He’d bought tickets for the event and thought that gesture alone would be enough, but she later explained that they had to sit at the tables near the stage. The dinner was sponsored by the school’s Tongan society, and the entertainment would be dance performances. Because of the way the hall was laid out, it was tough to see from anywhere but up front. That was where her two new friends, Lita and Elena, would be sitting.
Not wanting to disappoint his third grader, he said he’d get the VIP seating but discovered that you had to make a donation to get the upgrade. The news at the car line was that Lita’s parents had paid for a suckling pig. Elena’s had donated Hawaiian punch and the rum supply for the cash bar. Abel had just paid this month’s bills and didn’t have the funds for a suitable gift or donation. The bottom line was that he’d have to tell his wife and daughter they weren’t sitting up front with Lita and Elena.
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