Beach Strip

by John Lawrence Reynolds

  “You’re never a problem,” I said. “A pain in the ass sometimes, but never a problem.”

  I kissed her on the cheek and looked over her shoulder to see Alex peering through the door window at us. “Your lonely driver’s here,” I said, and she turned and showed him Tina number three. This one smiled with wide eyes and squealed with an eight-year-old’s voice when she opened the door, “Alex, you’re so good. Here they are,” pointing at her honey-coloured luggage. She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got three hours before my flight, so we can drive slow and talk.”

  Alex showed a series of gapped teeth and touched the brim of his cap.

  “You two go straight to the airport,” I called from the door as Alex carried Tina’s luggage to the limo. “And don’t forget—”

  I stopped at the sight of a small, shiny black van stopping in front of the house. In place of windows it had a silver hinge-like affair, as though the top could fold back like a baby carriage. A grey-haired man emerged from behind the wheel. He carried a plain metal box in one hand and a clipboard in the other. While Tina, Alex, and I watched, he glanced down at the sheet of paper on the clipboard, up at the house again, nodded to Tina and Alex—I almost thought of them as a couple—and walked toward me.

  “Mrs. Marshall?” He had a voice acquired by older men of a certain stripe, as though they had been smoothing their vocal cords with paste wax for forty years.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He handed me the clipboard and a pen. “May I ask you to sign here, please?”

  I signed the bottom of the sheet of paper and handed it to him. He thanked me, bowed his head, and with two hands gave me the box, which was about the size and weight of three pounds of coffee. Then he bowed again, took three steps backward, and returned to his shiny black car.

  Tina walked toward me, concerned. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the box in my hand.

  “This,” I said, and I was so glad I did not begin to cry, not there, not then. “This is Gabe.” Then I turned before Tina could hug me and closed the door, waving through the glass at her and nodding when she blew me a kiss.

  THEY COULD HAVE PUT GABE’S ASHES in a china urn “suitable for placing on a mantle or in a display case,” the young undertaker had told me. He had shown me a sample: deep blue, with small white flowers at its base and white birds soaring near the rim. It cost seventy-five dollars and qualified as a piece of china because that’s where it was made, which meant it was probably worth eight-five cents when it was crated on a ship out of Shanghai.

  I wasn’t being cheap when I said the metal box would be fine. I didn’t want Gabe on a mantel, which I don’t have anyway. I wanted Gabe in my bed. I wanted him holding my hand while we strolled the beach strip. I wanted him inside me on winter nights when we could hear the lake water crashing against ice-coated rocks along the pier.

  Tina was gone and Gabe was in a small metal box, and neither event was making me happy, so I poured myself some brandy neat and drank it while staring at the metal case. I had a little cry, poured myself more brandy, and drank it too. Then I curled up on the sofa and slept, waking when the telephone rang. I refused to get up and answer it until it rang four times. Telemarketers never wait longer than that. Sisters do.

  “I’m at the airport,” Tina said, a little breathlessly, I thought. “I’m taking a later flight, got a couple of hours to kill. Listen, I’m worried about you. I wish you would come and stay with me and Andrew.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What are you going to do with … you know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “That package the man in the black car delivered.”

  “Gabe’s ashes? I’m going to look after that tonight.”

  “What do you mean, look after it?”

  “I’m going to deal with it. Do what is right. Do what I want to do, which I know is not always the same thing, but I’ve made up my mind.”

  “Josephine, you have to tell me.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I’ll keep calling you until you do.”

  I said, “Goodbye, Tina,” added, “Goodbye, Alex,” and hung up. Then I curled myself into a ball and went back to sleep.

  I WOKE AGAIN in that same melancholy greyness of summer dusk that never fails to make me nostalgic. It made me feel that way even when Gabe was alive and we were walking along the boardwalk to Tuffy’s for hamburgers and beer. I have never been afraid of the dark. There is beauty to be found in darkness—the moon rising over the lake, making diamonds on the water, the shimmer of northern lights, the lights of ships in the distance. It is not darkness I fear. It’s greyness, the in-between, the dying.

  I made coffee and sipped it, feeling the caffeine doing battle with the alcohol and winning, until the telephone rang again. It was Mel.

  “Just called to see how you’re doing,” he said.

  I told him the widow Marshall was doing fine.

  “Why do you call yourself that?” he asked.

  “Because it gives me intrigue. Widows are always more intriguing than married women, don’t you think?”

  “I think you have always been intriguing.”

  “And I think you’re a nice guy. So does my sister, by the way.”

  “Tina’s an intriguing woman. She still there?”

  “No, she’s either in a Boeing over Manitoba or in a limo under the chauffeur.” I heard a truck in the background. “Where are you?”

  “On a watch.”

  “What, a Rolex?”

  “I was sitting here and I started thinking about you, wondering how you were doing.”

  “I don’t need you to come and see me.”

  “That’s not why I was calling.”

  “Sure it is. I’m alone in the house. We don’t even need a motel room now, do we?”

  I heard him breathe out slowly.

  “Okay,” I said before he could speak. “I appreciate you calling, I really do. But there’s something I have to do tonight.” I looked at the clock. It was almost ten. “Call me from your place at midnight if you’re still up.”

  “You’re not going out.” It was a command, not a question.

  “I have to.”

  “Did your sister tell you how many convicted perverts we’ve identified living on the strip? We’ve been interviewing them—there must be a dozen of them.”

  “Mel, I can find more than that on the bus into Toronto.”

  “One of them has been watching you from your garden shed.”

  “They’re tied in, aren’t they?” I said.

  “What are?”

  “The guy in the tool shed and Gabe’s death.”

  He thought it over. “It could be.”

  “I knew it.”

  “We don’t know for sure. Just don’t go out until I get there.”

  “You’re not coming here, Mel. Not tonight. Not anymore.”

  “Then wait for the morning.”

  “No.” I knew what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it now.

  He grunted. Something had distracted him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Something going on where you are?”

  “Yeah.” He lowered his voice. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Sure.”

  I was used to this. Gabe would call me while he was on a stakeout, or a watch, as Mel called it, especially late at night. He would tell me he was calling to see if I was safe, alone in the house on the beach strip. I knew that was a crock. Gabe had seen something that had shaken whatever faith he had in the goodness of human nature, and he needed to talk with someone he cared about. Someone, I suppose, he trusted. He would call and ask how I was, and I would say I was fine, I was watching television or reading a book, and ask when he would be home. And he would say, “Oh, soon. I have a couple of things to do yet, a couple of reports to write.” And I could tell from his voice, from the amount of shake in it and the way it sounded pinched and higher than no
rmal, that something had upset him.

  “You’re a cop,” I said to him once. “You spend time around murder scenes. You should be used to it by now.”

  “I’ll never get used to some things,” Gabe said. “Some cops do, but I never will.”

  “Then find something else, Gabe,” I told him. “You don’t have to be out on the street all the time.”

  “Yes, I do,” Gabe said. I remember he smiled at me in the way that could break my heart, and he reached his hand, one of his lovely bear-paw hands, toward me and curled it around the back of my head. “How about a coffee with some brandy in it?” he said. “And then I’ll tell you the joke about the bald-headed Swede who worked in the pickle factory.”

  There was no joke about a bald-headed Swede and a pickle factory. Talking about a non-existent joke was a joke in itself. We were silly like that. His mention of the joke about the Swede was our signal that we would fool around later, starting on the sofa in front of the television and finishing in the bedroom. Or, as we had done one warm evening, among the caragana bushes on the beach. God, some of us remain children when it comes to sex, as though we can restore its mystery and fascination to the same level as when we were teenagers. Perhaps that’s what Tina meant when she said men have affairs because they are afraid of death. The only way to hold off dying is to grow younger, not older. Maybe sex fools men into believing they are growing younger.

  I pictured the way Gabe looked when he made me smile, how pleased he appeared when he saw me laugh at his jokes, his fun. That’s the expression I remembered, along with the strong body and the bear-paw hands. I looked at the metal box delivered to me that afternoon. Gabe was not in there. I didn’t know what the hell was in there, but it was not Gabe, and I didn’t want it with me.

  The onshore wind would be cool, I knew. I slipped on a sweater, picked up the box, took my keys from the hall table, and left the house, locking the door behind me.

  SOON AFTER WE MOVED HERE, I told Gabe about the amusement park, the one that had stretched from the canal along the bay side of the strip across Beach Boulevard from our house. It had been built as an attraction for the wealthy families from the city who spent summers on the strip, Victorian classy with lawn bowling, a concert stage, and elaborate wrought-iron benches set beneath willow trees. When the wealthy people left for their air-conditioned mansions in the city and the workers moved in, the park became cheap and tacky the way amusement parks are supposed to be, with neon signs, carnival rides, arcade games, greasy french fries, and even greasier guys with cigarettes in their mouths and combs in their back pockets. The park was still operating when I was a teenager, although most of the rides were closed and things that once had been merely shabby were now a little scary.

  My father said that when he was a boy in the 1950s, excursion boats steamed across the bay from the city during the summer, carrying people to the beach strip amusement park, where picnic tables were set among trees near the shore and kids played on a safe, sandy beach. No one we knew went to Florida in the winter or to the northern lakes in the summer. No one we knew could afford it. Everything they needed for fun was on the beach strip. I suspect many of the old people who live on the strip today were once kids who rode the excursion boats to the amusement park back then, giddy with anticipation for rides on the merry-go-round, the ponies, the Octopus, and the Ferris wheel. The rides are gone, but the people remain, maybe because their goal as children was to always be near those long-gone amusements on the strip, and living here in rented rooms and peeling-paint cottages is the only ambition they truly achieved in their lives.

  The amusement park had been separated from traffic by fancy cast-iron fencing set between concrete posts lining the shoulder of the road. Each post was topped with an electric light inside a white globe, and the line of posts and lights extended all the way from the canal to the farthest end of the amusement park, across from the house that Gabe and I shared. I remember how attractive the line of shining globes appeared in the night air when I was a child, glowing soft against the glare of the neon and fluorescent lights of the rides and arcade. When the amusement park was demolished, so was the string of lights. The cast-iron fence was carried off to be melted down in the blast furnaces across the bay, and the light standards were shattered and carted away.

  All but one. The last one in the line, the one opposite our house, had been merely decapitated, and whenever Gabe and I walked on that side of the road and passed the waist-high stub of the post I would touch it, trailing my fingers along the pebbly surface. I don’t know why this one was permitted to remain. Perhaps because it marked the most distant corner of the parking lot that the amusement area had become. Boaters, dragging their toys on trailers behind their SUVs, drove through the parking lot to a launch ramp beneath the highway bridges, and others parked their cars there while they strolled the boardwalk or fished in the canal. There were always cars in the parking lot, and there were several now as I crossed Beach Boulevard with the box containing Gabe’s ashes under one arm and walked to the stubby post and dragged my fingertips along its surface.

  Ahead of me, the lift bridge grumbled with each car passing over it. To my left and two hundred feet above me, the high bridges roared with traffic. The steel mills flared, the waves on the lake whispered, and I walked in silence, my head down, carrying the ashes of my husband in my arms.

  I had planned to scatter them on the lake, but not in daylight. It would look like littering, which is what it would be. And this late in the season, bathers ventured into the lake to swim in the warm waters. I was unsure how someone might feel emerging from the water with Gabe’s ashes clinging to his Speedo. Besides, there was something socially unacceptable about the idea of scattering your spouse’s ashes while others watched, as though you were performing some private act in public. No, it would not take place in the glare of day. Nor would it happen, I decided, on the beach in an onshore wind that would blow Gabe back onto the sand and—a hideous but somehow appropriate thought—onto me as well.

  So I chose to scatter them from the lift bridge over the canal, whose waters flowed from the bay into the lake and would carry him toward the ocean like some sort of heaven-bound commuter. Gabe hated the idea of commuting. This trip would be different.

  I was not maintaining the correct sombre attitude here perhaps, but I have always clung to anything that makes me smile in the midst of tragedy, even if it comes with a side helping of guilt.

  Approaching the canal, Beach Boulevard rises to meet the lift bridge, creating room for people to stroll along the canal edge beneath the structure. I walked up the incline and almost across the bridge, a breeze off the lake teasing my hair. Cars passed and the glare of their headlights caught me, a lone woman with a metal box standing on a bridge late at night, prepared to—what? Leap into the water? Dump her garbage in the canal? Two cars slowed as they passed, their drivers staring at me, and when they did I resumed walking until I was at the far end of the bridge, waiting for a break in traffic.

  When I saw no cars ahead of me and none approaching from behind, I lifted the box to the rail and rested it there. With one more look around to ensure that I was alone, I glanced up to see the bridge operator, a balding man in a white shirt, suspenders, and thick-rimmed glasses, watching me from the window where he worked, pulling levers and pushing buttons. His office in an ugly metal structure painted the colour of an avocado was brightly lit and set thirty or forty feet above the roadway, giving him an unobstructed view of road traffic and approaching ships. He was looking down at me with curiosity and perhaps suspicion. I didn’t want an audience, so I lowered the box and began walking back along the bridge toward home, preparing to set my alarm for an ungodly hour like three a.m. But I knew, I just knew, I would not rouse myself to do this. I had to do it now.

  When I reached a point near the edge of the canal where the heaviest steel beam of the bridge blocked the operator’s view of me, I stopped. The steel beam was as wide as a small car, and in its shadow I
could scatter Gabe’s ashes unseen by the bridge operator. I would have to hold the box to one side and ensure that Gabe’s ashes fell into the water and not on the canal ledge. It helped that the wind had shifted to my left. The breeze would carry the ashes toward the centre of the water if I lifted the box high enough above the rail.

  No traffic was in sight. Out on the lake, a ship was approaching. I raised the box to the bridge railing and began prying off the lid. My hands were shaking so much that the lid slipped from my grasp and dropped directly beneath me, landing on the concrete wall of the canal with the sound of a cheap cymbal.

  Gripping the edge of the container with both hands, I inverted the box and shook it until, in the glow of reflected light from the bridge, from the stars, from the hot radiance of the slag pits across the bay, I could see Gabe slip away in a grey cloud of sorrow, first rising with the breeze and hovering above the canal waters, then falling forever into darkness.

  After all of him had vanished, I remained with my hands and my head lowered, waiting to cry. I felt sadder than I had ever felt in my life, but there was another emotion as well, and I recognized it as relief. I missed Gabe and I loved Gabe, and I would never in some way cease missing and loving him. But scattering his ashes to the wind and the water had marked something, an end or a beginning, or maybe both, and I was glad of it.

  I stood with my head bowed until I realized tears would not be coming. This surprised and comforted me, although it appeared to be accompanied by hallucinations, because I heard someone call my name.

  It’s Gabe, I thought for a heartbeat or two. No, it wasn’t. Gabe never spoke in a hoarse whisper, and Gabe never called me Mrs. Marshall. But someone had called me Mrs. Marshall, and he did it again. The voice came from the darkness beneath my feet, its owner standing directly under me, on the edge of the canal. I looked down into shadow.

  “Mrs. Marshall.”

  I looked around. No cars were approaching. The bridge operator was out of sight.