Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea

by Jonathan David Kranz

  Of course, her attention only made things worse. Muscle Head stood on principle: they paid for their tickets, just like everyone else. They had rights.

  There were four of them and one of Diana. Amy deliberately looked away, pretending to keep watch over a pair of twins struggling with the crater hole near her corner. Tango met my gaze. He spoke before I even reached him. “This is a management issue,” he said, putting up his hands. “Don’t you think management should manage it?”

  I had started to say something about all of us being in this together when I heard Diana fall on exactly the wrong words to say at the wrong time. “I don’t want to make you leave,” she said to Muscle Head.

  At once, the mood of this little group shifted into something more sober, even grave, their eyes reflecting a sense of caution. I had a feeling they had been through this before—and they didn’t care to see what would come next. Muscle Head pushed the shirt plucker from his side, asking Diana just who the fuck she thought she was. Diana responded so softly, I couldn’t hear what she said. With her hair falling over her face, I could just barely see her. The quieter she was, the louder Muscle Head became, waving the club in his hand, challenging her to “go ahead, call the police, call!” while the other guy in his group, two deferential steps behind him, grinned into the ground, his hands in his pockets. The girls made a game of turning to leave but, aware that no one was paying attention, turned back again.

  “You going to call? Call!”

  Diana lifted a hand to push the hair from her eyes, and Muscle Head, startled, took a sudden step back. One of the girls giggled. His face reddened. For a moment, he was a bundle of twitches struggling to control, or surrender to, the competing impulses under his skin. One of them had to triumph, and when it did, Muscle Head took a poke at Diana with his club. Not hard. Not a swing. But a poke. Right between her breasts. It all happened so fast—his movement, the girls’ shrieking, the sidekick behind him saying, “Whoa, hold up, hold up.” But in all this, one thing hooked me: the expression on Diana’s face. It wasn’t fear or anger exactly—it was the look of the abandoned, of a person with a sudden grim awareness that whatever else was going to happen and whatever would come of it, she stood alone.

  I’m not a brave guy by any measure, and all this time I’d kept hoping the whole thing would blow over, that one person or other in this party of idiots would have the sense—or the strength—to take this guy by the arms and lead him outside. I had watched and waited, silently hoping, until I saw that poke and caught Diana’s eye, a look that was neither a call for help nor a call for blood, but just a call. Out of nowhere, I snatched the club from Muscle Head’s hands, looked him in the eye, and told him it was time for them, all of them, to leave. Right now.

  A vacuum of silence. I could feel my heart beating in my throat, and my face tensed into a knot, expecting a fist in it any second. But there must have been something in my voice that meant business because they left. They left noisily. They left with a parting shot, throwing their plastic cup, lid, straw, ice, and all, into the fountain. But they left. I followed them out, then without thinking about my pants or shoes or anything, stepped straight into the fountain to fish out the mess they had left behind.

  When I climbed out, Diana was beside me, holding a towel—I have no idea where she found one—and when she handed it to me, our hands touched, and that triggered it. All the nervousness and fear came rushing to my eyes. I buried my face in the towel and turned away—a child’s way of becoming invisible.

  “That was scary,” Diana said.

  I pulled the towel from my face. “Yeah,” I said.

  “But we managed.”

  “I guess we did.”

  I thanked her for the towel, and she told me my sneakers were leaking. She was right—they were making little black puddles on the walkway—and I said they weren’t leaking, they were crying because they had been so scared. And Diana laughed.

  Lying in bed, I replayed the scene over and over in my mind, pausing, always, at her laughter, the kind of music it made.

  chapter nine

  what’s left behind

  Robert Leary of Wichita liked yard work because it gave him a sense of accomplishment. His wife, featured in all his photos, had a milk-fed plumpness and a ready smile.

  In Portland, Oregon, Bobby Leary worked part-time in an auto parts store while getting his songs together for YouTube. He had some kind of Celtic tattoo on his upper right arm; under the picture, a visitor left a comment, “It’s Irish for ‘shithead.’”

  In his comic strip, Sledge Leary found new life battling the ranks of the undead: werewolves, zombies, vampires. He carried a blowtorch now because the only way to keep the undead unalive was to cauterize their necks after tearing off their heads.

  And Ethan Waters, Ethan Waters of Sea Town, New Jersey, had tons of pictures on his Facebook page. Pictures of him on the beach, pictures of him with his brother, Jason. And quite a few where his face was obscured by a pair of mirrored aviator glasses.

  “I’m making new friends,” Rachel said to Mrs. K, who held her tongue, waiting for Rachel to say more. “One works at a go-cart place. The other at the Sizzleator.”

  “Either of them going to college in September?” Mrs. K asked.

  The clock cat shuttled its eyes, left-right, left-right. Always and forever.

  “Not likely,” Rachel said.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “No, it’s good. Why make friends with people who’ll leave in another month or two?”

  She left a note with the manager at the Sizzleator. She knew he was the manager because he wore a name tag that said so, gold on black. It was the one clean thing in the stand; too bad customers couldn’t eat off it.

  “Can I leave this for Ethan?” she asked.

  “Sure.” Given the eager way he had reached for it, Rachel was glad she had sealed her message in an envelope. The note began with two words: Don’t fall. She told him where and when they should meet and that she would be the girl in the blue baseball cap. I want to know why, she wrote.

  Rachel arrived early, positioning herself against the boardwalk rail where she could watch the front of the Aqua Arcade. It was unusually humid—the evening seemed set in a bowl of warm Jell-O. Streams of people crisscrossed in front of her, a parade of families and friends bumping shoulders as they walked side by side, their little collisions a kind of chorus of belonging. Rachel looked through them, waiting.

  She wondered what Leonard was doing. And wondered why she wondered that.

  At almost exactly nine thirty, a boy in an oversize concert T-shirt stopped at the front of the arcade, scanning the crowds. Rachel shifted behind a cluster of excited teen girls; they had made their minor collisions too violent, spilling food and laughter over the boards, their bodies twisted in giggles and embarrassment. The crowd streamed around them. Ethan didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, which moved from his sides to his pockets and back several times as Rachel watched. Their eyes met. Startled, he turned to the arcade with his hands clasped behind him, seemingly engaged by a display of hermit crabs.

  Rachel moved to his side, pretending to be absorbed in the same crabs that clung sadly to the chicken wire cage. A sign said the crabs were free—with the purchase of a complete “care kit.” At the cage bottom, crabs scrambled over each other in impossible shells painted with cartoon characters, tie-dye patterns, sports team logos. Spider-Man had nearly reached the top of the cage when his claw lost grip and he toppled to the bottom again.

  “Seems cruel,” Rachel said, turning to the boy. “There’s no escape, but you’d think they’re entitled to a little dignity.”

  He turned to look at her, then pointed toward his brow. “Mets?”

  “Yeah. Ethan?”

  He nodded. “Why’d you cover the logo?”

  “I’m not a fan,” Rachel said. “Of the Mets or anyone else. I’m Rachel.” She extended her hand.

  He shook it tentatively, as if skepti
cal of its reality. Nearby, the Drop Tower ride hissed and roared; a half dozen riders screamed together, their legs kicking outward simultaneously, the limbs of a startled insect.

  “You’re not what I expected,” he said. “I thought you’d be taller, more … I don’t know. I thought you’d be a Natasha or Marlene.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, oblivious to her sarcasm. Then his mood shifted, dark and sudden, as if he had just found a smudge of dog mess on his favorite shoe. “What’s this Don’t fall mean?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me,” Rachel said, watching him carefully. “I saw you. You and the pirate.” She tried to make a joke of it. “Arrgh.”

  He didn’t find it funny. “You tell anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “No.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  She wasn’t sure. There was her curiosity about his graffiti—why did he do it, and what did it mean? Then there were the brothers. She and Ethan probably shared a common wish that theirs, at crucial moments, had kept still. If nothing else, he knew what it was to lose a brother and perhaps—if the graffiti was any indication—to resent the big silence in which he was buried. “You play Skee-Ball?” she asked.

  The question seemed to catch Ethan off guard. He lifted his head. “Not in a long time,” he said.

  “Same here,” said Rachel.

  They found a row of open machines in the back of the arcade and chose two side by side. The air was dizzy with bells, spinning lights, the dead scent of burnt popcorn. Rachel made change at a machine that sucked in her five-dollar bill and spat out a clatter of quarters. She poured half of them into Ethan’s hands.

  Their coins released cascades of wooden balls that clacked neatly into their trays. Rachel rolled a few, thinking of what to say next. Without really trying—probably because she wasn’t trying—she scored a hundred points with a casual roll that dropped into one of the two narrow cylinders in the upper corners. The ball shivered inside the tube as if fighting its way through.

  “Good one,” Ethan said. “That’s the way I like to play it.”

  “I just got lucky,” Rachel said.

  In fact, after four or five balls, Ethan was ahead by thirty points. As soon as Rachel applied real effort, she racked up a series of gutter balls.

  “It’s all strategy,” Ethan said. “I go for the hundreds in the corners. Even if you only get two or three out of nine, you’re still doing good.”

  “You’ve given this some thought,” Rachel said, rolling a ball that lilted too much to the left, bouncing off the edge of the thirty cylinder, sinking into the ten.

  “My brother and I used to come here a lot,” Ethan said.

  “Jason?”

  “Yeah. You knew him?”

  “No,” Rachel said. “I mean, I knew of him. I knew him by sight. But I didn’t really know him.”

  “Me neither,” Ethan said. “And I’m his brother. Crazy, right?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Just sorry. I lost a brother too. On the Rock-It Roll-It coaster. Last year.” Rachel picked up a ball and felt disgusted with herself for doing to Ethan exactly what she hated people doing to her: rushing in with words, filling in the blank spaces before the awkwardness grew, like vines, around them. She pretended to focus on the game. Her next ball arched gracefully into the fifty as if guided by radar.

  “That’s the way,” Ethan said. They finished their set, Ethan ending sixty points ahead. “Nice job,” he said graciously, though he couldn’t disguise his pleasure with the greater number of yellow tickets that streamed from his machine.

  Rachel challenged him to another round. They played intently, silently. Again, Ethan scored higher, but this time by only ten points. More tickets poured from their machines.

  “What do you do with all your tickets?” Rachel asked, folding hers into her pants pocket.

  Ethan said he put them in a box he kept under his bed. “I save them up.”

  “For what?”

  “Depends. One year I wanted a laser-tag game. It was really cool. Came with two belts, two laser guns. But it cost twenty thousand tickets. Took me most of the summer to get to fifteen thousand.”

  “So what happened?”

  A shadow, perhaps of regret, perhaps of some secret shame, crossed his face.

  “I couldn’t wait for the next season,” he said. “Didn’t have the patience, I guess. I got a clock radio instead. And you know what’s funny?”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want a clock radio. I already had a clock radio. But it was exactly fifteen thousand points, so I took it.”

  Somewhere in the arcade, a teenage boy shouted, “You ditched it, man, you ditched it!” Another voice trailed behind it with a lot less enthusiasm. “Aw, shit,” it said.

  “What about Jason?” Rachel asked. Her next roll clanked the ball off the edge of the fifty, sending it sliding back down the ramp. She caught it before it dropped to the floor.

  Ethan smiled. “He didn’t get that many tickets. His strategy was all wrong.”

  “Why?”

  “He rolled for the middle. He had this theory: play it safe and aim for the fifty,” he said, pointing to the innermost targets. “And if you fall short, you stand a good chance of getting the forty or thirty. You keep steady, and you almost never get a gutter ball.”

  “Seems wise,” Rachel said.

  Ethan shook his head contemptuously. “He never got the big scores,” he said. “I beat him almost every time. My brother would get so mad.”

  “Got ya,” another voice said behind them. “Luck, sheer luck,” someone else said. “Not luck, my friend,” the first voice replied. “Mad skills, my mad skills.”

  Ethan held a ball with both hands, level with his chest, as if he were about to make an offering of it. “He mentioned it, you know.”

  “Who?” Rachel asked, confused. “Mentioned what?”

  “Jason, the accident.”

  “The roller coaster?”

  The arcade seemed to evaporate, as if everything around them had fallen back behind a secret wall for safety. “He said something to you?”

  “No,” Ethan said, rolling his ball up the ramp. “Not exactly. He wrote it down. In a journal.”

  “A journal?”

  Ethan nodded his head. “I shouldn’t be reading it, right?”

  “No,” Rachel said. “You should. It’s what he left behind.” Better, she thought, than a pillowcase full of seashells. “I’d like to read it. The part about the accident, I mean.”

  Ethan looked away, torn between silence and speaking. Rachel had seen this before with Curtis. Because of his bullheaded style of walking—head down, brows furrowed—Curtis had a way of finding things, like loose change, missing earrings, and puzzle pieces. For him, it meant the excitement of discovery. For Rachel, it meant vigilance, directing him away from lamppost collisions or outside the sweep of active swing sets. When he found something, his excitement was immediate and all-consuming; the world around him dropped away as he focused on the one thing that mattered, the thing in his hands. Although his enthusiasm was frankly exposed, getting him to reveal his find was something else entirely. Like a four-year-old, he would cup the coveted treasure with both hands and twist his torso aside to conceal his prize. Cajoling was useless; brute force was out of the question. But even if she could deny her own curiosity, Rachel couldn’t ignore the danger. As often as not, the prize was a filthy piece of chewed gum or a ragged shard of broken glass. Over time, she had learned to forgo the frontal assault for a flanking maneuver: shift his attention to something else, get him moving, and then he’d voluntarily open his hands.

  Once, Rachel’s patience had been rewarded with something truly remarkable, a robin’s egg as blue and inviting as an August sky after a sudden storm. Though he didn’t know what it was, Curtis cradled the egg in his pal
m intuitively, the champion of its fragility. Rachel explained what it was, and Curtis’s eyes grew wide in anticipation of the extraordinary bird that would eventually peck free from its shell. But when Rachel allowed Curtis to carefully tilt the egg into her own hands, she saw something he hadn’t noticed: a hairline fracture that almost certainly meant this bird was lost. “You know,” she had said, “the right thing here is to return this egg to its nest; its mother will be looking for it.” Curtis looked almost frantic, imagining the sorrowful mother searching hopelessly for her lost child. He nodded assent. Rachel made a show of burrowing into a nearby hedge where, with a regret she could still taste, she scraped a shallow hole with the heel of her sneaker, buried the egg, and concealed the crime with fallen leaves. She remembered squinting when she broke free of the hedge into the stinging daylight. “It’s home now,” she had said.

  “Listen,” Rachel said, taking Ethan by the elbow. “Let’s get a prize.” She led him to a counter at the back wall. An attendant, rigid with boredom, sat cross-legged on a high stool. In front of her, a glass case held plastic trays of knickknacks—candies, whistles, plastic animals—tagged with numbers. Behind her, the wall was draped with bigger items labeled with bigger numbers: stuffed animals, computer games, electronic toys.

  “You want that laser tag?” Rachel whispered, watching the attendant from the corner of her eye.

  “I don’t have enough points,” Ethan said.

  “Don’t worry about the points.”

  Ethan looked at her suspiciously. “I’m too old for laser tag,” he said.

  “Something else, then.”

  “You’re going to give me your tickets?” Ethan asked.

  “Something like that.”

  He put his hand to his chin, stroking whiskers that weren’t there. “An iPhone case,” he said, pointing to one on the wall.

  Rachel knocked his hand down. “Don’t point,” she said. “Just tell me. The red one on the left?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rachel almost laughed. Curtis would have picked the same one—the deepest red, the loudest color. And it also happened to be in arm’s reach. She pulled her tickets out and pressed them into Ethan’s hands. She nodded her head toward the attendant. “Get her attention, pick out a bunch of small things. Over there.” She pointed toward the far end of the glass case. “And keep her busy.”