by David Downie
“Hmmm . . . was it a blade or a wire of some kind? Nurse, let’s give Alex a little lidocaine right here?”
“Yes, doctor . . .”
“It was a wire,” Taz said, wincing, “barbed wire, in the garden, I guess, I mean, we were, like, gardening and watering and, like, James was rebuilding an engine, and we made some cuttings from the roses and . . .”
“Was the wire rusty?”
“I think so,” Taz said.
“Perhaps Mr. James knows?”
“It was rusted, Doctor, very rusted, we’ll both need tetanus boosters, unless Taz has had one recently, and by the way, I am not seropositive, and I do apologize for dripping blood on your hand.”
Dr. Dewey smiled and did not recoil—that surprised me.
“You call him Taz?” he said. “You must be a friend of Beverley’s.”
“That’s right, I’m passing through. I’ve been helping Beverley in the garden, like Taz, I mean Alexander.”
“I see,” said the doctor brightly. “Well, unless Taz has been to another doctor in the interim, he hasn’t had a tetanus booster since his grandmother brought him in for the first time, what was it, nine years ago, Alex? You were eight then and now you’re seventeen. Nine and eight make seventeen, wouldn’t you say?”
“I guess so,” Taz said.
“You guess so? I know so! So, the two of you were gardening and managed to get in a fight with the barbed wire at Beverley’s motel?” The doctor winked benignly and looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. “What’s she doing, putting in a sand pit for children? Or building a clubhouse for card players?”
“Everything Taz has said is technically accurate,” I explained, “we were gardening, watering the cuttings we’d made, working on a rebuild of Beverley’s old chainsaw, and tangling with barbed wire in the shack, where I also got these bruises by bumping into the bench.”
“Technically accurate?”
“Yes, it’s a question of unintended omission,” I said. “Taz has fainted a few times and I’m not sure how accurately he remembers things. We also went down to the beach, briefly, when waiting for the drone, and we got tangled up in some flotsam and jetsam with lots of rusty wire.”
“Waiting for the drone?”
“Yes, the drone that delivered the rebuild kit for the chainsaw.”
“For the chainsaw,” the doctor repeated. “I see. So, you’re saying the cuts may have occurred on the beach, not in the garden, is that it?”
“Yes, Doctor, I just want to be precise.”
“Thank you, Mr. James, that explains the sand and seaweed. . . . So, how was it, Alex? Didn’t feel a thing, did you?”
Taz shook and wagged his head, no and yes, in the meaningless way I had seen before. “Are you done? I’m, like, feeling kind of queasy.”
“Just about, now we need to give you both tetanus boosters and patch up Mr. James’s arm, unless he has other wounds we don’t know about.”
“Just scratches,” I said.
Dewey raised his piebald eyebrows and had us both strip off our shirts and pull up our pant legs. He painted the scratches and small cuts with disinfectant, and the nurse applied several adhesive bandages to each of us, at first staring at, then actively turning her eyes away from, the tattoos of skulls and bones on Taz’s knees and thighs. It was the first time I’d noticed them, and I, too, must have winced in disgust.
“Now,” I said, “I understand Taz has no health insurance. Beverley said to send the bill to her. I will pay her back for my share . . .”
“Hmmm . . .” the doctor began, checking his watch and smiling evasively. “I think you’ll survive your injuries,” he added. “I know Alex has no insurance, and I’m guessing you don’t, either, and that makes for lots of paperwork. Let’s chalk it up to experience, you can buy me a drink one day, Mr. James. Now scoot,” he said, addressing Taz, “I have a bunch of ornery folks who’ve been waiting a long time to see me. Say hi to your mom, Alex, I mean your grandma. She’ll have to bring you back next week so we can take out the stitches. Lucky for you, I didn’t need to put one in for each of your seventeen years! Tell her to phone and make an appointment this time, okay?”
TWELVE
It was nearly three in the afternoon. James had decided to drop Taz off before returning to the Eden Resort. There was no need to further involve the boy in what was sure to be a complicated aftermath. As they pulled out of the doctor’s parking lot, Taz sent a text to his grandmother, who was still at work, informing her he would be home early, so not to bother to pick him up at the resort. Then, at James’s request, he phoned Beverley. She did not pick up. Eventually the answering machine kicked in.
“He’s taking me straight home,” Taz said into his phone, “everything’s okay, we went to the doctor, I’ll, like, be in touch tomorrow, I guess. If you see Grandma tell her I’m going home now. I’m too dizzy to talk to anyone else.”
“Where to?” James asked as he merged onto city streets from the Seaside Mall.
“The Old Coast Highway, on Five Mile Creek, I’ll show you,” Taz said, shivering. “I’m cold . . .”
James’s heart pounded. “Which house is it?”
“You can see it from the beach, that big old wooden house on the creek. Some people call it the mansion. Can you turn up the heat? I’m really cold.”
James swallowed hard, his throat narrowing, the word “mansion” reprising itself in his head. What were the chances? In fiction it would seem unbelievable, a clumsy coincidence, but he knew real life was not only stranger than fiction, it fueled and infused fiction, it set the mind and the world in constant, uncontrollable motion.
Driving in silence due west across the defunct narrow-gauge railroad tracks, he continued west under the bypass, then headed north on the coast road, passing what his father had always called the “rural slum.” It was a shantytown populated once upon a time by those who had not found work at the mill, the drifters, the grifters, and the drunkards, and those who had worn themselves out with monotonous, dangerous work, then fallen by the wayside. James was surprised it hadn’t been cleared in the boom years. But no, here were the shacks with tin and tar roofs set among groves of scruffy blue gum trees and scrub brush; the chickens pecking in the dust between the carcasses of abandoned cars; the rusted box springs and woven rusty rebar transformed into fences and gates; and the resilient, un-killable crabgrass and Japanese creeper engulfing stumps, broken uprights, and piles of firewood, manure or discarded sheet metal. A tire biter rushed at them and ran alongside the pickup, barking and snarling. Some things never change, James told himself, accelerating away. Poverty preserves.
“You think they were real?” Taz asked, staring vacantly out of the window.
James clenched his jaw involuntarily then relaxed, shrugging the tension out of his face and shoulders. “Maybe not,” he ventured, trying to sound nonchalant, “it’s probably some stupid prank. When I was in high school, and even in college, I knew a few guys capable of doing that kind of thing. I’d forget it for now, if I were you.”
With his lips grayish blue and pursed in silence, Taz appeared to James like an ailing young camel again. Did Taz have the resilience of a dromedary, James wondered. Crossing the deserts of the coming decades was going to be challenging for everyone, especially someone who looked like Taz, above all in a place like Carverville.
The mansion had always appeared different when viewed from the level highway, seeming less tall, less grand, less a mansion than a ramshackle old Victorian house. Back in the day, some higher-up from the mill probably lived there. In the 1970s no one had wanted to rent or buy it—except his pigheaded father. James noted how neat the three-car graveled parking area and small front yard were now, bounded by the same low hedge of flowering Escallonia resinosa alternated with abelia that his mother had planted forty years before. The house was still painted white, the trim still brown, and both were reasonably fresh. In normal circumstances, even Taz might have noticed how naturally and smoothly Ja
mes pulled in across the gravel, parking Beverley’s pickup truck where he had always parked his own secondhand car, a clapped-out Mustang convertible from 1966 he had bought with the proceeds from summer jobs.
Getting out of the pickup, James inhaled the butterscotch scent of escallonia, his nostrils flaring. He glanced around but did not see the giant buddleia bush under his former bedroom window. Helping Taz up the wide wooden staircase, with its painted gray treads, and then across the porch, James sought the porch swing his parents had installed but saw it was gone, replaced by wooden benches facing terra-cotta planters brimming with white pelargoniums and trailing blue lobelia.
“I’ll settle you in then get going—Beverley must be wondering,” James felt he had to say. “And she might need her pickup truck back.” Pausing by the bow window, he tipped his head at the trapdoor hidden under the cushion of the bench seat and asked, “Ever open that?”
Taz nodded and brightened. “Yeah, it’s where I used to keep my toys, isn’t it cool?”
“Very cool,” James agreed. Steering Taz to an armchair in the living room, helping him out of the gardening overalls, and draping a plaid blanket over him, he waited until the boy had propped his injured leg on an ottoman, and pulled out his smartphone. James couldn’t help thinking of a pacifier, but he banished the thought and tried to sound unworried. “Shouldn’t you change out of those wet, sandy clothes? Maybe put on a pair of long pants or sweats?”
“I will later,” Taz said dreamily. “With the blanket I’m okay.”
“I could build a fire in the fireplace,” James said, “or the wood-burning stove.”
Taz seemed suddenly to have an idea and asked James to go into the rumpus room and bring back a “controller.” James asked what that was. “The console with two little joysticks,” he said, surprised at the older man’s ignorance. James did as Taz had requested.
“How about some water or juice before I leave,” James asked.
“Juice would be good,” Taz said, pointing toward the kitchen without raising his eyes off the phone’s screen. He had plugged the controller into his smartphone and was tapping and fiddling with the joysticks.
James knew his way to the kitchen. He paused in the semidarkness to see if the old sliding pocket doors built into the walls of the house were still there. Having always loved their beveled glass and carved wooden panels, he had never understood why his mother had hated them with such a passion. Feeling along the edge of the threshold, he could not resist flipping up the inset brass pulls hidden inside the width of the doors. They were still there. That meant the doors were, too. But if he pulled them out on their overhead slides he would give himself away and then be forced to explain everything to Taz.
In a corner of the room stood an upright piano. On it was a windup metronome in a pyramidal wooden case, surrounded by family photos. Peering at them as he passed through the gloomy room, he could not make out the faces and profiles of the woman, man, and child standing formally side by side, looking prim, proper, and very white, a perfect Norman Rockwell. Without his reading glasses and better light, he would not be able to identify them. Who were these people? he couldn’t help asking himself. Upright WASPs with an adopted camel-colored grandchild?
The icebox of old was gone, as he’d expected, replaced by a high-tech refrigerator whose wide double doors offered crushed ice, whole cubes, and hot or cold running water. On one door, held down with a magnet, was a childish drawing of a rhinoceros with a diagonal line drawn through it and the rainbow signature “Alex.” No rhinos allowed, or don’t kill the rhinos, James wondered, a partial, dismembered adolescent memory of a play staged at his high school floating to mind, then sinking again into darkness.
A kitchen island with a stainless-steel sink and six-burner stove rose in the center of the room where the old kitchen table had been. James found a water glass in a cupboard, filled it with orange juice, and stopped to stare out of the windows at the view of the beach and ocean. The fog was coming in, the sun already lost in an apricot haze. The waves pounded. Between sets, he could hear the rush of Five Mile Creek.
“Pretty special,” he said, returning to the living room and handing Taz the glass.
“What?”
“The view, the house, everything—it’s very special here.”
“I guess so,” Taz remarked, unconvinced. “It’s always cold and damp, and the fog stinks like rotten eggs some of the time, but Grandma says she liked it a long time ago and wants to die here, like it’s something she looks forward to. She was living here already when I moved in, but I don’t think she was, like, born here or anything.”
“I understand,” said James. “It’s very peaceful.”
“Peaceful?” Taz asked. “Sometimes I can’t sleep at night thinking we might, like, slide into the creek. I went to bed for a while wearing a life jacket. Part of the yard slipped a couple years ago, so they, like, put up those concrete pilings on the beach. The tsunami is coming anyway, everyone says so, even the deniers.”
Sighing, James said he’d better get going, the dusk was thickening, and the day was far from over. “Your grandma text back?” he asked. Taz nodded and drank his juice, staring at the smartphone and using one hand, fingers splayed wide, to move both joysticks, clearly on another planet. “See you,” James said. As he walked to the front door, he heard a whirring sound and turned as a small drone appeared from the rumpus room carrying fireplace kindling in a claw. It followed him across the front hall. Laughing, he remembered the toy-tethered helicopter he had played with as a boy.
“Once I get a real robot arm installed,” Taz said in his goofy voice, “I’ll, like, never get out of this armchair, I’ll be able to pick up the bag of potato chips and fly it over here, but right now I’m, like, building fires with kindling . . .”
Letting himself out of the heavy oaken door with a bemused smile lingering on his lips, James paused by the mailbox and struggled in the low light to read the name “Hansen.” Then he sat for several minutes in the pickup truck with the heat blasting and the window down, breathing deeply, batting his eyelashes, trying to clear his vision and make sense of things. The butterscotch escallonia scent blowing in with the misty wind merged with the smell of the nearly new cherry-red pickup’s interior, making him light-headed and slightly nauseated. So, too, did the fatigue and stress and cold. “I must replant that buddleia,” he said to himself, feeling drowsy and disconnected, “over by the propane tank.” He closed his eyes, nodded off for a few seconds, and jerked his head up, glancing around as if inebriated. Noticing for the first time the eight and nine of clubs dangling from the rearview mirror, he stared blankly at the cards and felt his teeth chattering. Shivering and itching all over, he realized with rude suddenness that he was soaked to the skin and covered with scratchy sand and beach burs. His own state of shock was wearing off.
Turning on the headlights and pulling carefully onto the Old Coast Highway heading south, he saw the same late-model compact he’d seen that morning, the one that had dropped Taz at the resort, and watched it now approaching, saw its turn signal come on, and stared intently, drunkenly, as a woman at the wheel, silvery hair piled atop her head, drove slowly past him, glanced his way, leaned into the turn, and swung her vehicle into the mansion’s parking lot with remarkable imprecision. Braking then crawling along, James checked his side mirror. Framed by it was the woman shutting the car door, using rubbery body English. Then she crossed the lot to the house as if she were dancing the swing, arms and legs flung wide. She was medium height, thin, and wore what looked like warm, sensible clothes of fawn, brown, and white, the same ones she had worn that morning. But it was hard to tell anything more about Grandma Hansen in the dim light and from an awkward angle, and his mind was not tracking normally. What was it about her driving and gait, glimpsed in the gloaming, that seemed somehow familiar? And how had a WASPy-looking elderly woman wound up the guardian and presumed grandparent of an adolescent camel? Recalling Beverley’s gossip, he smiled wryly
.
“Grandma Glinda,” James said under his breath, amused yet instinctively, unaccountably annoyed by the way the woman had unnecessarily leaned into the turn before pulling into the parking lot. He’d known people who drove that way, most of them hopelessly bad drivers who also couldn’t dance or ski. Good thing she’s back, he added silently. Taz doesn’t realize how traumatized he is, not by the stitches but by the skull and bones, and the scene at the hospital.
Remembering the trap and the rusted wires and saw blade, James squirmed in his seat and accelerated around the curves in the highway. Were they real? he asked himself. But he already knew the answer. During his stint as an underpaid assistant district attorney fresh out of law school, a twenty-six-year-old tossed into a rough precinct in the rotten core of the city, James had seen real bones, lots of real bones, usually with blood and sinews and cartilage attached, but sometimes bleached or clotted with dirt, and, once, a tibia and fibula still intact and sticking out of a half-rotten sneaker. Even when soaked in seawater, brined and battered by waves, in a steel cage thrown against rocks, ground by sand, and gnawed by fish and worms, you could tell real bones from fake bones. These were real, very real.
Dusk galloped headlong at him, riding sidesaddle on the fog, a translucent white angel of glowing darkness. Covering the three miles to the Eden Resort in a matter of minutes, James felt rushed, chilled, and uneasy. Rounding the blind, gooseneck curve, he slammed on the brakes, only half surprised to see the deputy’s Interceptor SUV, its roof lights flashing and swirling, in the public lot where earlier he had spent ten days parked in the RV. Near the SUV were a long heavy-duty van from the local TV affiliate, a big flatbed truck, a tow truck with blindingly bright lights, another police cruiser, and the cars, SUVs, and pickups of a dozen or more onlookers.
Parking in front of the resort, he heard the distant throb of rotors and the growling, growing roar of a helicopter’s engine. Where would Beverley be? he asked himself, not waiting to look indoors but crossing the garden at a trot toward the ocean. Distraught, her dyed red hair tousled, Beverley was leaning heavily on the banister at the top of the staircase, watching a group of men in wet suits on the beach below attach tackle to the cage, the tide smashing in around them and the fog now a hungry orange-white jellyfish sucking the dying sun from the sky.