Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea

by Jonathan David Kranz

  “Money?” I asked. “Power?”

  “Nah,” he said. I think he was disappointed in me. “Legacy.”

  I’ll be honest. I don’t know if it was the hour or the shock or what, but I was having trouble following him.

  He sipped his juice and winced—too much acid, even for my dad. He said Stone has already made his money and has all the power he can manage. “Now it’s about what he leaves behind. To his kid. For Diana. It’s got to be big, and it’s got to be”—he paused, searching for the right word—“intact.”

  “What if she doesn’t want it?”

  “Well,” he said, dashing the rest of the juice into the sink, “wouldn’t that be tragic?”

  chapter twelve

  circling the tanks

  It always struck Leonard how ratty and squalid the little aquarium was at the end of the Atlantic City island. But why, exactly? Where was the precise rattiness? Was it the missing shingles, like gaps in a street drunk’s mouth? The brown patch of scrub and picnic tables by the bay’s edge, about as appealing as a scab? The way no one cared to restore the aquarium sign, the paint chips curling like dead leaves from the exposed plywood?

  No, he decided, climbing out of his car. He chucked his cigarette onto the gravel. It was the whole sorry idea of the thing, the grinning cynicism behind it. School trip after school trip, he and his classmates, squirming impatiently in the windowless room they called a “Learning Center,” had heard the same story of “the gift,” of how the casino owners gave back to the community by building this (see the earnest learning associate lift her arms, see her make a present of all this to you, you underprivileged little boy and your underprivileged little friends), this aquarium. This place of education and recreation. This humble nod to the great sea surrounding the island and the citizens who lived beside it.

  On the wall, there was a large black-and-white photograph of two well-dressed white men shaking hands, smiling into the camera. Gold jewelry leaked from the wrist of one man; disgust escaped from the eyes of the other. In this room, they would shake hands forever.

  Shit—even in his thoughts, he dragged it out into two syllables, as if he were entertaining a friend sharing space in his head: shee-itt.

  Because that’s what it was, this halfhearted mausoleum of tanks and half-living creatures. A “gift” from men who couldn’t give a rat’s ass and didn’t care who knew it.

  And the strangest thing was, he knew she would be here, inside. He knew, not just because of the rumors he had picked up at the park like scattered litter from the ground, not just because it was whispered and wondered and weirded over. He knew, because he’d recognized her silver BMW and had the temerity to park beside it, practically cheek to cheek. He stepped back from the cars, admiring their proximity and their polar oppositeness, the one a luxury item, the other a beloved wreck. He patted the hood of his car—good boy.

  It took less time than he expected. He found her in a great oval room of tanks, a dark and high-ceilinged room that nonetheless felt like the cramped underside of some tidal pool rock. Glowing water circled the room. Bored fish made circuits inside their tank homes. Besides himself, there was only one other, and although she faced the tanks, he recognized the blade-lean silhouette, the cramped stoop of her shoulders, the long drift of her hair on the back of her neck.

  He approached, and when she turned, she spoke first. “Leonard Washington?”

  “Washington. Washington Washington. Yup.” His hands dived into his pockets. For all his clever, intuitive, knew-just-what-he-was-doing know-how, he had no idea what to say. He had figured he’d wing it and the words would just come. But they just didn’t.

  “Yup,” he said again.

  Since when had he become a country boy? He feigned interest in a tank, pressing a hand of lean fingers against the glass.

  When she brushed the hair away from her face, the gesture made her familiar to him again, like the bite of a forgotten candy flavor from childhood. She wasn’t exactly pretty—she looked too much like her father to be pretty—but, he had to admit, there was something there, a baby-bird something a lot of guys would want to scoop up and run home with. He just wasn’t one of them.

  “I never would’ve guessed I’d see you here,” she said. “I mean, I don’t expect to see anyone I know here.”

  He felt vaguely offended and didn’t like the feeling. He preferred to be clearly offended, thrown something he could openly swing back against. “I’m just curious,” he said, “about what’s under the surface. Of the water, I mean. You?”

  “It’s just a place to go.”

  “As far north as you can go on this island without drowning?”

  “Something like that.”

  They walked, Leonard marveling that in five years of working on the boardwalk, they hadn’t said so much as “boo” to each other, and now it seemed perfectly natural that they would be circling this dark room side by side. He held his hands clasped behind his back. He could practically smell her riffling through whys in her head.

  “Truth is,” he said, “I came here looking for you.”

  The response should have been “why?”—and he had girded himself for that with a half-formed answer he’d smooth into shape as he spoke. But she didn’t ask why, she asked how—how did he know she’d be there?—and when she asked it, he looked at the toes of his boots, feeling unexpectedly sorry for her.

  “Oh, you know,” he said. “People talk.”

  “They do,” Diana said.

  “Especially when you’re—”

  “The fairy tale princess?”

  “You’ve heard?” Leonard asked.

  “People talk.” She managed a thin smile. It didn’t last long. “You want something,” she said. “You might as well get it over with and ask.”

  Again, there was that pity thing. Leonard tried pushing it behind his back, a troublesome nephew. “The whole thing with the roller coaster,” he said, trying to find her eyes. “It wasn’t my fault, and you know it. I want everyone else to know it.”

  “What can I do?” she asked, looking away.

  Not honest, Leonard thought, not even close. It was the first check, an elbow in the ribs, against feeling sorry for her.

  “Word is that guy who drowned last winter, you knew him. Knew him well.”

  No smile, no expression. She seemed to retreat behind her eyes. A toddler hobbled through the doorway, his arms waving for balance, followed by a young woman in a half-crouched run. “You!” she said hungrily, as if he were an escaped chocolate that had managed to make a break from the dessert table. She gathered him up in her arms, and they left as quickly as they had entered, the echo of their laughter hanging in the air.

  “What are you talking about?” Diana asked, brushing hair from her face.

  “I’m talking about Jason Waters.” He had planned to play miser with his cards, turning them only as he absolutely needed to, but now he spread them open and wide, like a tipsy tourist. “I’m talking Moon Walk, drinking on the beach, riding on the Magic Carpet.”

  Faint light from the fish tanks waved lazily over her face. “People tell stories,” she said hopelessly.

  “People do,” Leonard said, playing his advantage. “But one person left a diary.”

  “Jason?”

  Leonard nodded gravely.

  “Have you seen it?”

  Leonard’s hands found their way into his pockets again. “Listen,” he said. “I’m not out to get you. That’s not Leonard Washington Washington’s style. Not my way of doing things. But…”

  “But what?” she asked, a hard knot in her voice.

  “But I got to be free of all this shit. This Rock-It Roll-It Coaster shit. You know what I’m saying? Free of it.”

  They were in front of an especially dark tank. A formal label on the wall identified the occupant as an electric eel. A far less formal, more urgent message was taped to the tank. DO NOT DISTURB THE EEL, it said in handwritten capital letters—an angry protest from
a would-be defender. Diana drew herself close to the glass, squinting into the murky water. “I don’t know what you think I can do about it,” she said.

  Leonard stepped up beside her, looking in. “There are only two other people who know about this diary thing,” he said. “But that can change.” He shielded his brow with the cup of his hand and looked closer, scrutinizing the water for life. Finally he saw movement, a long supple s-curve. A satin banner of dorsal fin teased the water in waves that pulsed back and forth over the eel’s spine. “It’s supposed to be electric,” Leonard said. “Does it ever light up?”

  “Tap the glass,” Diana said.

  “What?”

  “Come on,” she said, meeting his eyes. “There’s no one else here.”

  Leonard made a tentative fist, lifting it toward the tank. “I don’t think we’re supposed to do that.”

  “I won’t tell. Go ahead. Tap it.”

  Leonard rapped his knuckles on the glass. With a speed that seemed impossible just a moment before when the eel appeared more to drift than to swim, an open mouth whipped toward the sound; a shock of light exposed a halo of hostile, pin-sharp teeth and two ruby eyes, like flares, blazing above them.

  “Jesus,” Leonard said, jumping back from the tank.

  “Careful who you disturb,” said Diana.

  August 29, 2013

  Tomorrow I’m going to Pittsburgh. This afternoon, I gave Ethan a lot of the stuff I don’t need, stuff my grandparents gave me that I was supposed to learn from, which I never actually used, stuff that would feel out of place in a dorm room: a globe, three volumes of condensed classics, a chrome desk set with pen, pencil, and paperweight. Though the occasion might have called for some kind of sentiment, it wasn’t a warm and fuzzy Hallmark moment. Ethan is too honest for that.

  He asked me what he was going to do with “all this crap.”

  I said something about gratitude and the lack thereof, and he said, “Well, give me something to be grateful for. Not junk you don’t want.”

  He had a point. Right then and there I wanted to give him something real, something good, but scanning the room, I couldn’t think of anything. He probably thought I was being stingy when in fact I had just come up empty.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I got nothing.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I get the room to myself. That’s enough.”

  Saying good-bye to Diana was harder. Much harder. The more we talked about how we were going to see each other again—and soon, and often—the less real it seemed. We were on a boardwalk bench picking at a couple of hot doughnuts gone cold, feeling frustrated. Her parents, who were supposed to be out that evening in Cape May, had made a sudden change of plans that stole the house from us. I tried not to think about what we were missing, but it wasn’t working.

  “Talk about bad timing,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “I envy you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “You get to leave.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re leaving too.” She was headed to Fairleigh Dickinson, not because she had any particular enthusiasm for staying in New Jersey, but because it had a hospitality program.

  “Not really. It’s more like a pause. After four or five years, I’ll be back in Happy World.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “I know I should be grateful,” she said. “And I am. But.”

  I tried to be sympathetic. “It’s a lot of work,” I said.

  “It’s not just that. It’s … it’s lots of other things too.”

  “Like what?”

  A gaggle of seagulls poked around the crumbs at our feet. One of them looked up, anticipating a bite from the piece in Diana’s hand. She saw the gull and began to conduct the bird’s movements with waves of her wrist. “When my dad gets home from work, you know what he talks about?”

  I shook my head. I had trouble picturing him as a man returning home, engaged in the casual business of pulling a snack from the fridge, picking up a remote, collapsing on a sofa.

  “The injustice of it all,” she said. Her entranced seagull chased a chunk of doughnut Diana flung away. “How he can never trust anyone. This one’s lazy, that one’s stealing behind his back. No one does what they’re supposed to.”

  Including you? I wondered. But I didn’t say. Just us being together was its own kind of answer.

  “We have pictures,” she said, gripping the bench on either side of her legs. “Black and white. What the boardwalk once looked like, before the Stones, way back when. The Pirate’s Playground? That used to be a bowling alley. Where Happy World is, that was a ballroom and a couple of taffy stands. My great-grandfather started out roasting peanuts—Stone Nuts. Then my grandfather got bigger ideas.”

  “He built the first amusement park here,” I said.

  “And the second. And the first french fry stand. And the first mini golf.” Diana smiled. “Before us, there wasn’t much here but an ocean.”

  I laughed. “We owe it all to the Stones.”

  “You can thank my grandfather. Someone should.”

  “Your father doesn’t?” I asked. I thought of my own father. After almost thirty years, he was about to be shown the door. “Your dad has a funny way of showing his appreciation.”

  “He doesn’t appreciate, he resents,” Diana said. She crumbled a bit of doughnut between her fingers. She said that back in the eighties, they almost went bust—grandpa had bought one stand too many, and the debt piled high. “My father never finished college. He came back and went to work.”

  “My dad too,” I said. “About the same time.” But he didn’t have a boardwalk or a cute bear logo to show for it. He just had hope that everything would go back to normal, the sooner the better.

  “My dad says the books were a mess, everything was a mess. Then a little bit at a time, one season after another, he built it up again. The way he tells the story, he did it all by himself.” She lowered her voice. “I’m sorry,” she said, “about your father.”

  “I thought they were friends,” I said. “I just don’t get it.”

  “What is it people say?” Diana asked. “That it’s lonely at the top?”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “You think it’s simple?”

  For a long time, we didn’t say much more. Diana threw the last of her doughnut in the air, setting the gulls into combat, and we got up to stretch our legs, walking aimlessly along the boardwalk. There was that strange, end-of-the-season vibe, as if magic carriages were about to turn into pumpkins. Stores that had gouged tourists all season were now marking down their crap by the day: 20 percent off, 25, 50. No one wants to be stuck with inventory that’ll have to be stored all winter. And then find it’s out of fashion next season.

  The foreign workers, the “guest workers”—in their heads, they’ve already gone home. They’re counting the hours and killing time exchanging text messages to friends and family in Israel, Russia, the Czech Republic. The people who own or manage the stands are all doing the math. How’d they do this season? Did they move enough shirts, boogie boards, hermit crab cages? Did they make a killing? Or just enough to coast until next summer?

  We townies have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we all say we’re glad to see the tourists go, to have the place to ourselves again, to have everything “back to normal.” But the absence of crowds just means that summer’s coming to an end and the days are growing shorter. And you know what “normal” really means, but no one will ever admit? It means three seasons of hoping that the crowds return next summer and that you’ll be able to hang on until things pick up again.

  That’s the way it’s always said: “when things pick up again.” We all nod and understand without having to say anything more. It’s our way. Our code. You get a coffee in the morning, shake the rain water from your jacket, and when someone asks you how things are going, you say you’re holding on, you know, until things pick up again. There are three long sea
sons between summers.

  “Don’t you wish summer would never end?” I asked Diana, squeezing her hand.

  “No. I wish it wouldn’t begin,” she said. “Summer’s a promise that can’t be kept.” She looked out over the sea. “He suspects, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “My dad. About you. And he’s not happy.”

  “How’d he find out?”

  “There are no secrets. This town’s too small.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She kept her gaze out over the water, fixed and frozen. Paralyzed. I gave her hand another squeeze. It was time to say good-bye, at least for a while, anyway. Until Thanksgiving. Until Christmas. Until next summer.

  “But there’ll be phone calls and e-mail and texts,” I said, trying to make the best of it. “It’s not the real thing, of course, but it’s better than nothing. Right?”

  “Better than nothing.”

  “We got to hang on,” I said. “Until…”

  “Yeah,” Diana said. “I know.”

  We were both crying. I walked her home. I looked at that big window facing the ocean, remembering how good it felt when we were on the other side, together, looking out.

  “I’m going to miss you,” I said.

  She said she already did.

  chapter thirteen

  rachel’s children

  The best Stan could do was point Rachel to the right general neighborhood. “Leonard was a talker, that’s for sure,” Stan said as he wiped down the counter. “But he didn’t have much to say about family.”

  Rachel wasn’t sure which troubled her more: not finding Leonard or Stan talking about him in the past tense. It had been the same story at SeaSwift Go-Carts, except that the fat ticket clerk couldn’t help but smile when he said he had no idea what happened to “old Leonard.”

  “He was scheduled for his shift, and he never showed up,” the clerk said, absorbed once again in his Game Boy. “I haven’t heard or seen from him since.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?” Rachel asked.

  “I got coverage,” the clerk had said. “One goes, another comes in.”