Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea

by Jonathan David Kranz

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  This story is dedicated to the strong women in my life: my wife, Eileen, but especially my daughters, Rebecca and Anastasia, who in their youth have, like Rachel, shown the world the lion hearts of the brave.

  aftermath

  The beach was the one spot the police and fire crews could not close to crowds attracted to the flames. People gathered on the sand, summoned by an ember sky and the pillows of white smoke riding through Sea Town. It was after midnight, and the crowd had the matted, tossed-together quality of people hastily roused from sleep and dressed in whatever had been close by: pajama bottoms, loose shorts, oversize T-shirts, and zippered hoodies. Mostly, they watched Happy World burn in silence, hugging themselves against the cold night air. Children clung to their parents’ pant legs, and grown men and women covered their mouths, trapping gasps behind their hands. The air crackled with bullhorn commands and the popping of heat-splintered wood. The crowd seemed immobilized by its fascination. When the tide crawled up the beach, the onlookers closest to the ocean were startled, as if the sudden water were hands that had reached out low and cold to grab them by the ankles.

  In front of the amusement park’s castle facade of arched entryways and rampart towers, firefighters in yellow slickers heaved lines of fire hose. Arcs of water shot up and out from glittering chrome nozzles, desperately pushing against risers of flame that refused to back down. The fire punched through the castle clapboards in glowing vines twisting up and around the guardian towers, illuminating the sentries, the brass buttons of their uniforms, and the steel blades of their bayonets. In mute empathy the crowd drew closer together, fixated on the toy soldiers’ impending doom.

  A bullhorn roared, and at once the yellow slickers fell back. Firelogged clumps of clapboard dropped from the walls, raining down on the boardwalk below. The collective sympathy of the crowd turned toward a dark brute on the ground, a fiberglass bear with its arms raised to welcome guests at the central gate. In a matter of seconds, a bonfire of debris had encircled the bear; the gesture that for years had beckoned guests now became a plea for help, begging escape from the flames.

  The crowd, both horrified and fascinated, could no longer remain silent; bursts of protest, first in whispers, then in shouts, rose from the onlookers. “No way.” “This can’t be happening.” “No.”

  At the far edge of the witnessing mass, two young people stood apart, a pale girl in a baseball cap, a black boy with a restless Afro that shook in the breeze. Her head was on his shoulder, as if taking shelter under his hair.

  “Look,” she said. An entire wall peeled away, a hot and impatient flower of fire that came crashing down, taking sentries and turrets and flag posts with it. The collapse exposed a skeleton of black steel and smoking strings of loose cable, and buried the bear for good.

  “You know what happens now?” the young man said. “Everyone’s going to say, ‘This is our 9/11, the day Happy World burned down.’ There’ll be posters and T-shirts: ‘August 14, 2014. Always remember.’” He squeezed his companion’s fingers. “They’re going to come for us,” he said. “We should go. Now.”

  “No,” she said. “Too suspicious.”

  “What about Ethan? You think he—”

  “No.”

  “Glad you’re so sure. He probably thinks it was you. You think he’ll say so?” When she didn’t respond, he added, “They’ll look for enemies.”

  “Then they’ll be looking the wrong way.”

  He searched her face. “You know who did this?”

  “Maybe,” she said, drawing her arm around him. “Sledge Leary?”

  “I wish. But this ain’t a comic book,” he said. “Seriously. Is it someone close to us?”

  “Close to us?”

  With the collapse of the Happy World facade, the fire, as if it had run out of rage, began to dim. Rolls of black smoke replaced the flames, and the beach crowds began to disperse.

  “Close to us?” the girl said again. “Yes and no.”

  chapter one

  following the script

  Rachel did not know where she would find what she was looking for, or even what exactly she needed to find, but she was fairly certain that once she got beyond the seasonal displays of inflatable toys and neon boogie boards, she would find the homely, useful things that should be the true business of a hardware store. This one had low-hanging fluorescent fixtures and the sour smell of weed killer and burlap sacks. Like a houseguest searching for a bathroom, Rachel peeked uncertainly down the aisles. The signs suspended from the ceiling were only marginally helpful. She wished for something explicit, like “stuff you need to fix a hole in the wall.”

  An employee in a store apron approached Rachel, examining her as if anticipating customer needs was one of his chores. Rachel did not appreciate the attention. In general, she dressed for invisibility. She wore loose cargo pants and a white sweatshirt that sagged from her torso like a spent balloon. A blue baseball cap, with a strip of duct tape covering the sports logo, crowned her shoulder-length brown hair. Her canvas sneakers, which were originally bright blue, were now dishwater gray.

  “Looking for something?” he asked.

  “I need to fix a hole. In a wall.”

  “Drywall?”

  “Yeah, it’s dry.” She felt a little defensive. She and Betty had at least a baseline level of competency, enough to keep the damn walls from getting wet.

  The man crossed his arms over his chest and smiled. “I mean,” he said with mock patience, “is it Sheetrock or plaster?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a wall.”

  “Ohh-kay,” he said. “How big is this hole?”

  About the size of a man’s fist. Not a particularly large man, nor even an especially angry man, but a frustrated man who had run out of things to say and, not wanting to leave without having the last word, had made his concluding argument in the wall.

  “About the size of a doughnut,” Rachel said.

  “The doughnut hole or the whole doughnut?”

  “The whole. The whole doughnut, I mean.”

  “Good,” the man said. “I’m glad we’re being scientific about this.” He ticked off the necessary items on his fingers. “You’ll need a ten-inch knife, maybe a six-inch knife, a patch kit, some mud, a mud pan—”

  “Mud?”

  “Joint compound.” He rubbed at a dirt spot on his apron. “You know, it might be easier to get help, have someone do this for you.”

  It wouldn’t, Rachel thought. The guy who had left the hole in the wall was the plumber Betty had called in to fix a leaky faucet. That was a month and many noisy nights ago. The faucet still dripped, just not as much.

  “We’ll do it ourselves,” she said.

  “Then you’ll need the right tools.” He motioned Rachel to step aside and, while she w
aited, harvested the necessary items from the shelves. They made an expensive-looking pile at the counter. The man scanned them into the register, and Rachel admired the point-of-sale displays: key rings, candy-colored miniature flashlights, and little pocket knives, too adorable to be either effective tools or weapons, which would fit comfortably into a purse or pocket—which, Rachel thought, would fit very comfortably in her hand.

  With Curtis, taking things had been easy. He was a walking distraction, a goodwill magnet who attracted many fans, mostly women, but men too, who threw affection on him as readily as the devout pinned dollars on parade saints. While Curtis plucked their heartstrings, Rachel plucked their tabletops, their counters, their shelves. At home, she had a dresser drawer full of cosmetics she would never use, a closet rack of clothes she’d never wear—that was beside the point. The point was a little in the having, a lot in the taking, but not at all in the using.

  Now there was this man standing right in front of her, no more than two, maybe three, feet away. That would be cutting it close. But, Rachel believed, the distance between two people could hardly be reduced to a matter of inches. “You have the number of a good handyman?” she asked.

  “After I just rung all this in?”

  She smiled. “You might be right. I might need help. Just in case.”

  “You have seven days for returns,” he said, turning toward a drawer behind him, “if you have the receipt and the stuff isn’t used.” While he rummaged for the right business card, Rachel picked an emerald green folding knife from the display, slipping it into the cargo pocket of her pants, where it hung weighty and full, like a ripe piece of fruit.

  * * *

  Under Rachel’s bare feet, the sand shifted damp and cool. Betty, satisfied with the dark, said it was time, and they crossed the beach toward the water’s edge. Betty carried the pillowcase full of shells—she insisted on it—and Rachel carried their footwear and a loose sheet of paper that shuddered in the breeze. The boardwalk world receded behind them, a blade of bright lights between the black sky above and the night-dark beach beneath it. Crashing surf overwhelmed most of the carnival chatter on the boards.

  “You couldn’t have … you know?” Betty said, sweeping her free hand up and down her body to signify the clothing on Rachel’s.

  “It’s what I always wear,” Rachel said.

  “That’s what I mean. Just for today, I mean.”

  The Big Day. While Rachel had patched the wall, Betty said they had turned a corner. It had been a bad year, and they needed a fresh start. To close one door and open another, they would return Curtis’s shells to the sea. They had spent the last hour working on a memorial in the kitchen, Betty dictating the meaning she was looking for while Rachel found ways to put that meaning into words. They wrote about returning home, about finding a way forward, about an end that was a new beginning.

  Rachel wasn’t entirely sold on the script, but it didn’t matter: Betty bought it. In any event, she could hardly read it.

  “You bring a flashlight?” Betty asked.

  “No,” Rachel said. She regretted her missed opportunity at the hardware store, the handy miniature flashlight she could have taken instead of the pretty knife.

  “Shit. Can you read it anyway?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good girl.”

  Rachel parked their shoes side by side in the sand, and the two walked to the edge of the surf, Rachel now holding on to the script with both hands to keep it from being ripped free by the wind. She looked out over the waves but did not think about Curtis or his shells or memory—she looked ahead, anticipating how good it would feel to be in a time and place where all this would be something behind them, the wake sliding back from their boat.

  As if.

  “You think it’s enough?” Betty asked.

  “What?”

  “Are we just going to dump them here? Shouldn’t there be more to it?” Betty shielded her eyes against a sun that was not there, saluting the dark.

  She was looking for signs, Rachel thought. A kind word from the wind, a nod from the moon. Maybe something she could see, but more important, something she could feel. Betty expected something that hadn’t yet arrived. Rachel needed to break the paralysis. “We could throw them,” she said. It might be satisfying, grabbing a handful of Curtis’s old shells and flinging them into the waves. It had been a big step just removing them from her room, which she had shared with Curtis—he hadn’t been able to sleep without her. There were shells on every available horizontal surface—on the dresser, on the windowsills, on Rachel’s vanity, where like soldiers, they had surrounded her hairbrush.

  “Mom,” Rachel said, “we can’t just stand here.”

  “Over there,” Betty said, pointing to a jagged ridge of seaweed-slick boulders jutting out from the shore into the waves. White curls of water smacked against their sides, sending up leaps of sea spray. “We’ll pour them from up top. Make an offering of them.”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. At the far end of the jetty, mounted low to the rocks between two crossed red flags, a white steel sign shook in the wind. DANGER, it said in blunt capital letters. The sign was new. Last winter, a teenage boy had slipped from the top of the jetty and cracked his head, drowning in the water below. People talked about why and how, and the town responded by putting up a sign.

  “We’ll just have to be careful, that’s all,” Betty said.

  “Mom…”

  “C’mon. Less talking, more doing.” The words faded in and out as Betty released them, eaten by the wind. There was no point in arguing. Betty started for the jetty, and Rachel followed through the wet sand to the slick stones. They climbed awkwardly, making handholds in the empty air to balance themselves, crabbing their way over the cold stones, squishy with bladderwort and sea lettuce. Several times Rachel slipped, forcing an odd dance of swinging arms and jerking legs to regain her footing. Betty, walking confidently a few yards ahead, seemed more stable.

  Just feet from the sign, shoulder to shoulder on the rocks, they were getting hammered by bursts of salt spray. “We’ll have to make this quick,” Rachel said, yelling into Betty’s ear.

  With the sack clamped between her knees, Betty crossed herself. “Let’s get started.”

  It was almost impossible to see, impossible to hold the paper still. Rachel improvised, merging what she could read with what she remembered and what she could make up on the spot. “We come to this place—”

  “Is that what it says?”

  “Yes!”

  “Don’t we start with something about God?”

  “Oh, God,” Rachel said, “we come to this place, a place Curtis loved, to remember and to honor and to hope.” From the boardwalk, the PinDrop exhaled a deep, hydraulic sigh.

  “Go on.”

  “To hope and to return”—she nodded at Betty, and Betty opened the sack—“to return what Curtis loved to the place he loved,” Rachel continued. She suddenly pictured her brother with his hand squirreling down his shorts—a not infrequent occurrence—and suppressed a smile. That was a love with no place to return to.

  “The place he loved,” Betty repeated, looking around as if admiring the water, the waves, the jetty, for the first time. Rachel looked too, hoping this would be a last time, thinking how wonderful it would be to see it all like objects in a rearview mirror, diminishing with distance.

  Betty grabbed Rachel’s shoulder. Rachel thought she was about to slip, but Betty pointed to the sign between the crossed flags. “Look,” she said.

  “I told you it was dangerous,” Rachel shouted.

  “It’s a sign,” Betty said, almost inaudibly.

  “Of course it’s a sign.”

  “Look.”

  Beneath DANGER, someone had added in a sloping, elementary school print, Don’t fall.

  Betty clamped a hand over her mouth as if preventing a prisoner there from escaping.

  “It’s just a coincidence,” Rachel said. “It doesn’t me
an anything.”

  Betty shook her head.

  “It doesn’t mean a damn thing. We’re almost done. We’ll finish this, and then … then we can move on.”

  “We can’t. Not now.”

  “Why not?” Rachel asked. “Because of the sign? Because of some stupid words?”

  But Betty had already slung the sack of shells over her shoulder and was mince-footing her way over the rocks to the shore.

  “Give them to me, then. I’ll do it by myself.”

  “You can’t,” Betty shouted from the beach end of the rocks. “This isn’t a by-yourself kind of thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Family,” Betty said, wiggling her feet into her sandals. “The ties that bind.”

  When it suits you, Rachel thought. She wadded the memorial into a ball and threw it into the water, watching it bob like a little doll’s head before it was overcome by the waves and drawn down into the sea.

  May 17, 2013

  You get the best views from the crest of the Ferris wheel: rooftop air-compressor assemblies; cooling fins, stacked like steel toast, at the power transfer station; the long narrow ghost of the railroad right-of-way where the tracks used to be, years ago, when tourists came here by train. They come by the carload now. Next week, the roads that stretch out like frayed wire will be jammed with minivans. Next week, Happy World will open for the season.

  This week, Walter and I have to get things ready. This is the time of year Walter hates the most. There are a thousand details leaning on him, and one big boss bearing down. He’s the classic Happy World employee. Forget Happy World “magic”—experience has made Walter a believer in Happy World power, the power of Stone. Today, after a couple of test runs of the wheel, I asked Walter to let me on for a preview of the ride. He wasn’t crazy about the idea. “Stone’s already got my nuts in a sling, and I promise you, they don’t need any company.” But I was persistent: if it wasn’t safe for me, how could we open it to the public? That was hardly Walter’s concern. He wanted what was safe for him.