Hard Case Crime: Witness To Myself

by Shubin, Seymour

  His father worked late most nights, coming home after Alan and his mother had dinner, and he took a lot of business trips. But he occasionally took Alan to a ballgame, and he generally saw to it that they went fishing on at least the first day of trout season. He gave Alan a good feeling about reading, and neither he nor my aunt made a big fuss about him watching too much TV. My uncle was tall, six-feet, slender, with gray-streaked brown hair; Alan sort of looked like him, though he had black hair and was a little shorter, about five-eleven.

  My aunt was of medium height and a little heavyset, with a round pretty face and short sandy hair that was gradually turning gray; a good cook and housekeeper though she always had a twice-a-week maid. She used to tell Alan stories about her childhood, always happy ones, but once in a sudden burst of tears she told him she’d had a miscarriage a few years before he was born: late enough so they knew it was a girl. It was the first and last time she ever mentioned it. But Alan often thought of that little girl who would have been his older sister.

  That flower.

  Chapter Three

  Alan stopped at the first service station he came to and filled the tank and bought a bottle of water at its so-called mini-mart. As he was pulling out it began to snow, tiny dots at first on the windshield and then heavy splatters. He found himself wishing it was the start of a blizzard, that soon he wouldn’t be able to drive on; but that, he told himself, was crazy, he could turn around at any time. But in any event the snow stopped shortly; he had driven under a black bloated cloud and now was in sunshine again.

  The weather had been perfect every day of that trip fifteen years ago but the trip itself had started off wrong. For one thing, he was angry at his parents and at himself. They had come to him with the idea of this vacation as if it were a done deal, when he had a first-time job he was looking forward to as an assistant sports counselor at a day camp.

  “Come on,” his father said, “you’ve got your whole life to work. Don’t ruin this, we’re a family, it’s probably something we’ll never do again.”

  “But you could have asked me, couldn’t you?” he demanded. “You could have at least asked me!”

  “Alan,” his mother said, “don’t raise your voice. You always raise your voice.”

  “I’m not raising my voice.” Always, it seemed, he was being warned about a fiery temper he didn’t know he had. And this would only make him angrier. “I’m just talking, I’m just making a point.”

  “Well, then just talk,” she said.

  Eventually he gave in without much more of an argument than that, though the feeling of being treated like a baby, hardly anything new, smoldered in him.

  And then, the second way it started off wrong was that his mother and father had a fight only about ten miles into the trip.

  They hardly ever fought but when they did it was as though, to him as with most kids probably, his world was in collapse.

  This time it was over something as trivial as his father’s sunglasses.

  His father asked her as he was driving to get them out of the glove compartment. When she couldn’t find them he said, “You put them in there, didn’t you? I asked you to.”

  “Well, I did.”

  “Then they’re in there. Look for them again.”

  She went through the compartment again. “No, they’re not. You must have taken them out. Try to remember.”

  “Don’t tell me to remember. I didn’t take them out.”

  “Bob, please. Check your pockets.”

  “I told you I didn’t take them out.” But he patted at his shirt and then dug into his pants pockets. “I don’t have them. Now you try to remember. Did you really put them in there?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Well, they’re not there and I don’t have them!”

  “Then they must have fallen out of your pocket.”

  “Christ, will you stop that? I told you I never took them out!”

  “Bob, don’t yell at me.”

  “Yell at you! Yell at you! You don’t know what yelling is!”

  And on it went, in that luxury motor home, their voices growing louder and more accusatory. And though Alan loved his father deeply, he was the one he always hated when they quarreled.

  The shouting back and forth gradually turned into silence, then the tension in the silence began to ease up when his father found his glasses when he reached under his seat, where they’d fallen. He apologized, several times, but Alan’s mother stayed silent for a while. But then, looking out her window, she began remarking about the beauty of the bay they were crossing over, so blue and dazzling in the sun; and soon they were a family again.

  My own mother and her new husband — a marriage that would last about five more months, ending in her second divorce — had rented a beach-front house (on pilings) for a couple of weeks in Sea Belle, on the New Jersey seashore. I was nineteen, a junior at Bucknell, and was spending the weekend with them before going back to my summer job moving things from one place to another in a large wholesale grocery warehouse. I didn’t like the guy and wasn’t all that happy about being there. But I was looking forward to seeing Alan and his folks, who’d said they would be visiting for a few hours before moving on.

  I remember their large motor home pulling up in front of the house, and marveling that my uncle was driving one for the first time at his age. He represented to me all the security in the world, a little remote but solid, just as my aunt was all smiling warmth. I envied Alan his parents, though that didn’t mean I wasn’t crazy about my mother. Thin where my aunt was a little heavy, she sold dresses at a luxury department store, loved to laugh, was the first on the dance floor at weddings, and thought I could do no wrong. I just wished she had better taste in men, including my father, who was living somewhere or other.

  Alan had a nice smile, and we slapped each other’s hand hello. In a way, he was still a kid to me at fifteen; it wasn’t easy to let go of the memory of once making sure he held my hand when he crossed a street. He was thin and as tall as he would ever be, just as at his age I was already my present six-one.

  After the usual hugging, they showed us through the motor home, something that only enhanced my feeling of their togetherness, and after lunch we went out to the beach. I remember walking single-file along the path through the high dune that almost hid the ocean from the street. Long tufts of grass speckled the dune and there was a partly buried line of wire-strung palings along both sides of the path.

  The beach was fairly crowded; a lifeguard stand was about a half-block away. A few people waved to us as we came out. We set up the chairs we’d been carrying and put up a large beach umbrella, though no one sat under it.

  As I remember, I was talking to Alan about a soccer game he’d been in when another couple, the Devlins, who were friends of my mother from home and were staying nearby, walked over to say hello. He was a rather short, bald-headed man, his wife a homely woman, gaunt-faced and with a slightly hooked nose and red-tinted hair. They set up their chairs to sit for “just a few minutes,” as Mrs. Devlin said.

  It was shortly after this that my aunt said, “Alan, let me put some sunblock on you.” She was leaning forward in her chair, holding out the bottle toward him.

  “Not right now.”

  “The sun’s very strong, you’re going to get burned.”

  “I said I will, not just now.” He was obviously annoyed.

  “I’m telling you,” she warned gently.

  He turned away and looked down the beach. He was obviously embarrassed, a teenager’s embarrassment, that she was still holding out the bottle when he’d said no; I could just see him thinking, God, didn’t she understand no? The ocean was a deep green with high breakers that were bringing in some seaweed; the sand had a black fringe near the water’s edge. People were jumping up and down in the waves, or diving under them, or streaking on rafts to the beach. I noticed him watching a couple of girls in bikinis talking up to the two lifeguards on the stand; noticed it b
ecause I was looking there too.

  “Alan,” Mrs. Devlin suddenly directed a question at him, “are you driving yet?”

  “No,” his mother answered for him, “he’s got a year to go.”

  “Oh my, just wait till he’s sixteen.”

  “Oh I can’t wait for that scene,” my aunt said, and because she and the others were smiling, Alan apparently felt he had to smile too, though he was obviously embarrassed.

  “How are the girls treating you?” Mr. Devlin asked him.

  He shrugged and with this his father said, “The goils? I don’t think he’s going out with goils yet.”

  It wasn’t the first time Alan had heard him refer to girls in this way when it had something to do with him. He didn’t know why but it was as though his father had a problem not just with the word but with the idea of him with girls. Alan looked away, hoping that would deflect conversation from him, and it did. But soon he was looking back. He looked at Mrs. Devlin, who was turned the other way, talking with his mother. She had on a green one-piece bathing suit, a wide-brimmed straw hat, and sunglasses that had bits of colored shell on the frames. Homely though she was, she was well built, with long shapely legs.

  He turned away when she looked back.

  He asked me if I wanted to go in the water and I thought about it and then shook my head. He stood up, thinking, as he would recall it, that if his mother said anything like be careful, which wouldn’t have bothered him any other time, he would have broken, red-faced, into a run. But she didn’t. He had always been a good swimmer and the water was just cold enough for him. He dove under a wave and then another, and then swam beyond where they were breaking and continued parallel to the beach. When he came out he shook away the towel my aunt handed him and started to sit down but then remained standing.

  Actually he was telling himself to sit down, just sit down, but even though it had become an outright plea now he still remained standing. And then he said, “I’ll be right back, I want to get something from the car.”

  My mother said, “You want the bathroom, use the house. There are two.”

  “No, I want to get something.”

  His father must have turned off the air conditioning, so the heat of the motor home blasted him as he opened the door, but he didn’t put it back on, telling himself he would just change into dry trunks and go out again. He locked the door and changed, but instead of leaving he sat down on the sofa. Behind his closed eyes he sought a face, a body. He thought of the two girls at the lifeguard stand, of some movie actresses, of some centerfolds and of bra and panty ads, and then, almost reluctantly, of Mrs. Devlin.

  He tried to fight against it, knowing he would despise himself, already half despising himself. But gradually that homely face took on a kind of smile it didn’t have in real life.

  Give it to Mrs. Devlin, she was saying, please honey, give it to Mrs. Devlin.

  From what I was to learn, they stopped at a couple of places in Maine, then headed up to the tip of Cape Cod, to Provincetown. They thought they might stay there at least one night but it felt too crowded and they started to head back. But soon my uncle began exploring and pulled into a wide dirt lane that led through thick woods to the top of a high dune overlooking an empty beach and the ocean.

  My aunt said, “Are we allowed to stay here?”

  “I don’t know,” my uncle said. “I don’t see why not.”

  “Did you know when you turned off it would lead to the ocean?”

  “I thought it might.”

  “Do you have any idea where we are?”

  “Well, I saw a sign.”

  They were, he said, on the outskirts of South Minton.

  Chapter Four

  Alan got up about eleven the next morning, which was late for him, and was a little surprised that his parents were just getting up too. He stepped outside, into a bright clear day, and walked to the edge of the dune: The beach was empty as far as he could see to either side. After breakfast the three of them half-slid, half-walked down the dune, carrying a blanket and a couple of small sand chairs. They had some paperbacks and a transistor radio that they didn’t turn on. Alan sat on the blanket, a book in hand. He was tan by now, didn’t need sunblock anymore.

  He had recently gotten into Salinger, and one of the books he’d brought along was a collection of his short stories. But he found it hard to concentrate and put it down. He looked at the ocean, which was fairly calm that day. As he stared at it his thoughts began drifting and then went back in time and settled on Mrs. Devlin. How, he asked himself for the dozenth time, could he have thought of that with her? And yet remembering what his mind had done to those legs and even that hooked nose and terrible red hair gave him an answer that he could feel all over again. He got up and said he was going in the water.

  “Hey, just remember,” his mother said, “there’s no lifeguard around here.”

  He nodded, walking away before his father might decide to explain to him again about riptides, how if you got caught in one you shouldn’t try to fight it but swim parallel to the beach until you could swim in. But he didn’t go too far out, just enough past the waves where he could swim easily. When he came back he said he was going for a run. This, they expected: He loved running, had run as far as twenty miles a few times, though he knew he could run much farther. He took off slowly along the surf. The woods stretched on above the dunes to his left; he couldn’t see a house.

  After about half a mile he took another swim, this time a quick one, and then, because the sun was so bright and he wasn’t wearing sunglasses, he decided to run back through the woods if possible. He didn’t know if there was any kind of trail back there or if his bare feet could take it. But he liked the idea of testing and toughening his feet.

  He climbed up the dune at a spot where there was an opening in the woods. He walked in about fifty feet and found a sandy trail through the trees, but it went in the opposite direction from where they were parked. He started walking along it, then began jogging again, slowly, taking in the silence and feel of the woods, which he’d always associated with Indians ever since he was a kid. In fact he used to daydream as a kid about being an Indian boy, in a loincloth or naked and running free.

  He ran a short distance and then stopped at a lane that went to his right to the beach. He was about to turn back when he saw a girl of about twelve standing looking at him and then up at the trees and then back to him. Her skin was light brown, and she had long glistening black hair. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, the halter flat.

  He said, “Do you want something?”

  Without answering she pointed to a tree. He saw a red kite caught on one of the lower limbs.

  “I’ll see if I can get it for you.”

  He had to go a few yards back on the lane and then went in among the trees. The kite was on a thin limb that grew, twisted, toward the ground but it was a little beyond his reach. He jumped up and after a couple of tries caught the limb in his hand and bent it down. Stretching out his arm he grabbed hold of the kite and shook it free from the branch and it floated down. He noticed now that it was torn. When he started to walk to the lane with it, he saw that she’d come in a few feet and was standing there, looking at him.

  “You know,” he said, “it really wasn’t worth the trouble. It’s no good anyway, it’s got,” and he used a word that he only wished he could take back, “a hole in it. Can you see the hole?”

  She didn’t answer. She kept looking at him.

  “It’s got a hole in it,” he repeated.

  He found himself staring back at her. She was such a pretty thing, her large eyes as black as her hair. Her bathing suit hugged her firm slender body.

  Suddenly he wanted to say that word again.

  “Do you know what a hole is?”

  She still didn’t answer.

  He told himself to get out of there, to run from there, but instead he kneeled down and put his forefinger on her groin. She gave a quick gasp. But she didn’t mov
e, as if frozen. He started to stand up, heart galloping, still begging himself to run, run, to get away from this girl and these silent trees and back into the sun, but instead he stooped down again and hooked his finger under the swimsuit at her legs, to feel her skin.

  “Stop,” she shouted. “Stop it!”

  She started to pull back, then began to cry. A cry that was like a fire alarm in his brain.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded, jumping up. “Don’t cry, please don’t cry. You can go. I’m sorry, you can go.”

  She whirled and started to run, still crying. Terrified, he grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t tell — please don’t tell.”

  “Let me go! Let go!”

  “Listen to me. Please.”

  She started to shake free and he grabbed her again, this time hooking his arm around her throat, and her cry was cut off. He began dragging her deeper among the trees and threw her down. He stared at her, lying motionless face down. He stood there for several moments, but she still didn’t move. A part of him wanted to kneel down to feel for breath, but instead he began to run. He ran deep into the trees, ran stumbling, soon suddenly lost, not knowing in which direction was his home — the motor home was home — then running just to keep running.

  He was sure he had killed her.

  Chapter Five

  He kept running in panic, this way, that. At one point the woods opened to another lane and he took it but it led to the beach and he didn’t want to be seen on the beach; it was as though people were already looking for him, would point and yell and come racing after him. He ran back into the woods again but couldn’t find the narrow trail he’d been on, and he made his way around trees, jumping over fallen limbs, heading in first one direction and then the other. And then he saw sunlight ahead between the trees. It was another lane to the beach, and this one was where the motor home was parked.

  He ran inside and closed and locked the door. He almost crumpled to the floor but stood there trembling violently, his arms around his chest. He was still trembling as he lowered himself to a crouch, then covered his face with his hands, fingers digging into his skin. Oh God, oh God, what did I do?