Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  The detective explained that the car was left on a curve by a cluster of trees where the occupants of two if not three houses might assume that it belonged to someone visiting their neighbours. I stop the hirecar in the spot she has described. I feel safe here. No house overlooks me. I could get out and walk back down the street and no one would notice the car and probably they wouldn’t notice me either.

  I drive up and down the street twice. Finally I park right where Daddy’s car was parked. As I walk away I hear my own feet on the broad sidewalk. Click clack, click clack. Immediately I am alert. I stalk my footfall and the imbalance disappears instantly, the way it always does as soon as I become aware of it.

  At the end of the street there are trees. Three kids with skateboards linger beneath them, watching me. I walk right up to them and as I get closer I see three more kids, hanging from branches or leaning against dark trunks. I say hi. I am relieved when, after a pause, my greeting is returned.

  ‘See where I parked my car right down there?’ I ask, turning and pointing. They nod soundlessly. They are all boys. They have the fleshiness of early puberty.

  ‘On Monday there was another car parked right there all day, maybe longer. A real old car, an Oldsmobile, with a dent on the front fender. Did any of you guys happen to see it?’ I hear my own words and a curious cadence in my speech. I think that’s how I talked when I was their age but maybe it’s just the way I heard other kids talk, because my isolation was complete before I was eleven.

  ‘Sure,’ says one of them. Another agrees. Another says that he passed right by the car twice and a competitive voice insists he not only saw it but nearly crashed into it on his skateboard. Two of the boys slip into rivalry, claiming successively more intimate relationships with Daddy’s Oldsmobile. I smile.

  ‘Mrs Steadman in 3315 finally called the police,’ another says helpfully.

  ‘Do you have any idea how the car got there?’ I ask and there is silence.

  ‘Nope,’ says one.

  More silence, then a voice informs me: ‘Someone got murdered in it.’

  ‘But how did the car get here?’ I persist. ‘I mean, did someone park it and walk away? Park it and climb into some other car that was waiting? Or, how about this: a tow truck. Maybe it got towed here and dumped.’

  They look at me. One kid puts his foot on his skateboard and wheels it backwards and forwards as though he’s about to go somewhere.

  ‘I saw a tow truck,’ he offers. But he can’t remember which day or whether it was the morning or the evening.

  ‘Are you the police?’ asks a boy who is sitting on his skateboard. ‘You don’t look like the police.’

  ‘No,’ I admit. ‘I’m interested because the car belonged to my father.’

  ‘Did your dad get murdered?’ he demands, his voice high, half joky, unsure of himself.

  ‘Well…’ I hesitate. It’s new territory for me, too. ‘Yes.’

  They are greedy for details. I tell them that Daddy seemed to have been killed at Big Brim beach but no one knows how or why anyone would want to kill him and no one understands how his car could have got here. They present me with a series of theories that are right out of a TV show. Daddy wouldn’t pay his blackmail money. Daddy committed suicide and made it look like murder. Daddy had a long-lost son nobody knew about who appeared and wanted all his money. Daddy saw something bad, like a rape, and then got into a fight trying to save the victim. Daddy was a mafia boss. I look at their smooth faces and bright eyes. Whatever serious difficulties they have encountered have mostly been on screen, far removed from their quiet existence in Lowis. Maybe if they stay here in the San Strana valley for ever they will escape life’s battering and stay smooth-cheeked.

  ‘This is my father you’re talking about,’ I remind them, and they fall silent. ‘He was a good man. A college professor. He wouldn’t have been involved in any blackmail or long-lost son or mafia scenarios.’

  ‘You don’t seem too beat up over it,’ observes a crewcut who is sitting on his skateboard. I stare down at him in surprise. The boy makes himself look back up at me but he shrinks a little inside his baggy short pants and massive T-shirt.

  ‘Sure she does, Tony, for Chrissake. It’s only little guys like you who cry when they’re sad,’ says a much deeper voice, and Tony reddens.

  ‘My mom didn’t cry when her dad died but she needed anti-depressants anyway,’ announces a child from the branches of a tree.

  ‘So, did you cry?’ Tony persists. His face is red now and he is glaring up at me as though he’s angry. ‘Did you cry when they told you?’

  ‘At first I was too shocked. I’ve cried a lot of times since then.’

  ‘You don’t look like you’ve been crying. Didn’t you like your dad?’ he insists. His ears are crimson, and, beneath the crewcut, his scalp. He scoots his body backwards and forwards without moving his feet.

  ‘I loved him,’ I say. ‘I loved him very much and right now I feel as though I’ll never be the same person I was before this happened.’ I feel my face crease up and I know I’m going to cry. At least that should please Tony. I turn away from the boys and walk back down the street. Behind me is silence.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ I say over my shoulder when I can speak but my throat has thickened and the words can barely escape. There is silence behind me.

  ‘Hope they catch the guy who killed him,’ calls a small voice eventually.

  16

  I am walking over to the Zacarro house to ask Mr Zacarro about the Sunday evening he spent with Daddy when I am ambushed by a memory so powerful that it halts me.

  I have stumbled down Daddy’s drive, stubbing my toe twice and once grabbing the low branches of a eucalyptus to prevent myself falling. I have walked along the dirt road, and noted that the potholes are in just the same places they were when I was a child, although the foliage has of course grown. The Zacarro house has a corner lot and when they first moved in, before it got draped in trees and bushes, the neighbourhood kids cut the corner, treading in the dry dirt between the plants and occasionally treading on the plants themselves. Mrs Zacarro was the gardener but she didn’t seem to mind. It was Mr Zacarro, a man of renowned temper, who caught me once. He yelled furiously and finally switched on the sprinklers. When I arrived home, wet, dirty and tearful, Jane was irate: ‘I’m going to call him right now! I’m going to tell him that you’re sick and he shouldn’t do that kind of thing to you!’ I pleaded with her not to. As I turned into the steep Zacarro drive, I found myself, even now, hoping that she never did.

  Over the years, storms have washed away much of the drive’s surface. I remember when the asphalt was so new it was sticky and you could smell it from our house. Now the only smell is the smell of heat, beating against every surface, battering the face of the leaves until they hang in submission.

  I trip in a pothole and brush against something at the edge of the drive. A plant, insignificant in appearance, fighting for space with fleshy weeds. Its pink flowers are bowed and dusty. Its leaves are sticky. Within two steps I can feel its residue on my legs and within another two the air is thick with the perfume it has released and, almost before I finish inhaling it, my heart has stopped beating and become a stone, falling towards the earth. My chest heaves. I gasp for air. My eyes fill with tears. I hear a sob as the memory escapes from some deep, closed, quiet place inside me.

  It was morning, early but not too early to feel the sun’s touch on my shoulders and the backs of my legs as I walked up this drive to ask about Lindy. I had gone to bed anxious and woken anxious. I felt shy but I had to go because I had to know that everything was okay. I moved slowly. I walked right at the side of the drive knowing the touch of my leg would release a sticky sweet aroma from the pink flowers which Mrs Zacarro had planted alongside the asphalt. She had planted them from the bottom to the top and I walked with one leg trailing through them so that by the time I was within sight of the house I was dizzy, close to nausea, from the sun and the oppressive cl
oud of perfume. My leg was covered in a viscous film like flypaper. Some insect, maybe a bee, was droning too close to my hair but by now my head felt detached from my body and I did not even attempt to wave it away.

  Drugged by the aroma, I didn’t even feel astonishment when I looked up and saw Mother emerging, fingers fluttering like trapped birds, from the Zacarro house. Although I knew this was astonishing. At that time Mother seldom left our house and never alone. As she drew closer I saw horror on her face and an extra energy fuelled her walk which I knew to be dangerous. When she saw me she looked right at me and then away.

  ‘You can’t possibly go in there,’ she said.

  I didn’t need to ask why. I knew they’d found Lindy.

  Mother didn’t pause but walked right on past me with the disconcerting, jerking gait of someone in an old newsreel.

  The whole class went to the funeral. Lindy had been the prettiest girl and that was a reason for some people to dislike her when she was alive and for everyone to cry some extra when she died. Except for me. I couldn’t cry at all. I tried but no tears would come.

  Slowly, I stumble on up the broken asphalt towards the house, hungrily inhaling the plant’s vanishing perfume as though it carries some encoded information about the past. When I’m more than half-way, when I’ve passed that place where Mother instructed me to turn back, I tell myself I’m finally completing the last journey I made here, so many years ago. I’ve thought about Lindy more in the last couple of days than in all the intervening years but I still excluded her death, as though I long ago pushed some kind of delete button. She died when we were eight. The next few years were informed by her death. Eventually I determined never to think about her at all. I was so successful that when we arrived here and Sasha, half-joking, asked me whether the Zacarros were good neighbours, all I could recall was Mr Zacarro’s limp.

  When I reach the top of the drive I see a car facing the garage. The trunk is towards me and I notice at once that it is closed with three metal padlocks, enormous padlocks which look like they came from a jail. The padlocks make the hairs on the back of my neck reorganize a little.

  I ring the doorbell. I wonder how Mr Zacarro feels about old friends of his daughter. I wonder if he hates them for still being alive. I wonder if he yells at them and then turns on the sprinklers.

  There is no responding sound from inside so I wander around the house the way I used to when I came to play with Lindy. I move slowly, as though the hot air is resisting me. At the side gate I see a pool. In the pool a large brown body floats motionlessly, back down, arms and legs splayed. There is no ripple or movement on the water’s surface. Various flotation aids sit on the still water or around the edge, some in luminous oranges and yellows. A floating armchair is moored to one side.

  I let myself in quietly through the gate but when it clicks softly behind me the brown body at once folds itself and raises a hand, breaking the water’s smooth surface. As if joining in the greeting, the water toys begin to bob, jostling against Mr Zacarro’s body and one another.

  He bellows: ‘Is it Jane or is it Lucy?’

  ‘Lucy.’

  ‘Good!’ he yells disconcertingly.

  I stand closer to him now but he continues to roar at me. ‘I’m real glad you came. Real glad, Lucy. I want to say how sorry I am about your daddy and I want you to tell me what’s been going on over there. I tried to get up the drive but they got some kind of dumbfool barrier and then I got stopped by some guy who thought he was real important because they gave him a uniform and a clipboard. Want some beer?’

  ‘Well… thanks.’

  I don’t recognize Mr Zacarro. I remember him as a large man and when he heaves his body up into the floating armchair in a practised manoeuvre around the pool steps I see that he is still large. His head is almost hairless now.

  He instructs me: ‘Just on the porch there’s a fridge and it’s full of cold beers. Bring me one too, will you?’

  The porch. When Lindy and I weren’t on the swinging seat over at my house we were here in the porch playing with our little toy horses. Lindy’s favourite was a sweet-faced chestnut. Mostly they were made of plastic, a few were china and soon got chipped but Lindy’s chestnut horse had a soft coat and legs you could bend. Trigger. His name comes bounding into my mind like a horse galloping up to a gate. His name was Trigger and Lindy used to say that when she was a little older she’d have a real horse which looked just like him.

  I glance around the porch. I had a few of my own little horses over here when Lindy died and I never came back for them and now I half expect to find the cardboard stables we built, the ever-present Trigger, the toys I left behind. When I see that they are all gone I feel an absurd disappointment.

  I take the beers outside and pass one to the floating man. He gestures for me to sit down at a poolside seat.

  ‘So, Lucy Schaffer,’ yells Mr Zacarro. ‘I guess I’ve glimpsed you since you grew up but I remember you best playing out back with the kids.’ His voice is without modulation. I swallow. I don’t want to be the first to mention Lindy.

  ‘How are Davis and Carter?’ I yell back. By now I’ve worked out that he must be deaf and I should speak loudly.

  ‘You don’t have to shout. I’m not deaf. Davis started up Hooleran Software and now he’s got a turnover of I don’t know how many zillion dollars a year, and Carter’s doing just great in real estate, four kids and counting. They’re busy so I don’t see them too often. But they call me.’ He gestures to the telephone nearby. I look around for the first time and realize that the back yard is furnished. There are the usual poolside couches and chairs but there is also a dressing-table, a chest, a TV, two mirrors and a few photos hanging on the metal fence which nestles into the hillside. By the side of the pool, arranged neatly, is a small pile of rocks. Some are round and consist of interesting seams, others are crystalline.

  Mr Zacarro watches me. ‘Your daddy gave me those rocks. He often brought me rocks and I put them all right there.’

  As he gestures, his flesh folds down his big stomach like ribbons of brown dough.

  ‘What’s that one?’ I ask, pointing to a rock which lies behind the rest, larger and flat-faced. Words are inscribed on it.

  He smiles. His smile is crooked.

  ‘It’s a headstone.’

  The headstone is way down at the shallow end. I get up to take a closer look. I read: ‘Remember death. Joe Zacarro always did.’

  ‘There’s a space underneath for my dates,’ he explains helpfully. ‘Do you like it?’

  I nod, returning to the vast body, sprawled in its floating armchair.

  ‘Did you see Daddy Sunday night, Mr Zacarro?’

  ‘Joe. Yep, he came over here, so did Adam Holler.’

  ‘You were one of the last to see him alive.’

  ‘I know that, Lucy. It doesn’t make me feel good.’

  ‘How was he, Mr Zacarro?’

  ‘Fine. And call me Joe.’

  ‘Do you know whether he saw anyone else on Sunday?’

  He shrugs a big shrug. ‘Didn’t say so.’

  ‘What time did he go home?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was here an hour or two.’

  I see small goose-pimples appear across his chest.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I ask. ‘Can I get you a towel?’ He smiles and I guess that my solicitous tone has pleased him. And then something sad flits across his face like a leaf scuttling along in the breeze and I know that he’s just wished he still had a daughter to ask him if he’s cold and needs a towel. He thinks about Lindy every day.

  ‘Well, Lucy, I don’t feel the cold these days,’ he yells. ‘At first it was hard, in the winter, but I just don’t feel it any more.’

  ‘You swim all year round?’

  ‘The truth is that I don’t do so much swimming now. I float a lot.’

  He drinks some beer and then slips it into a can-shaped crevice in the arm of the chair. Whenever he speaks, the chair bounces in the water
and tugs at its rope so that it seems Mr Zacarro will soon drift right away.

  I look around again.

  ‘You…’ I hesitate ‘… you live out here? In the pool?’

  ‘Oh, sometimes I go inside the house. But it hurts, see. When I’m up on land I lumber around like some kind of big old moose. I got one leg shorter than the other so I’ve always been a moose. Don’t you remember that about me? I always thought it must be the one thing people noticed.’

  Mr Zacarro limping. Mr Zacarro turning on the sprinkler because the water travelled faster down the hose than he ever could. Mr Zacarro chasing after Davis and Carter, shouting with fury and Davis and Carter laughing, laughing at their father, knowing he could never catch them. I experience again that mixture of acute pain at his humiliation and terror at his anger. For a moment I cannot look at him.

  I say: ‘When did you build the pool?’

  ‘Boys were teenagers I guess. I got so I came home every night and had a swim, winter and summer. I’d always known I was a water creature. I can move how I want in the water, look real symmetrical. I guess I just spent more and more time here so now I hardly leave it.’

  ‘But you’ll come to Daddy’s funeral?’

  ‘Sure. I get dressed sometimes, I go to the store, fill the freezer. Since Gracie left I’ve pretty well eaten out of the freezer. I don’t like to leave the water more than an hour or two. Lucy…’ He paddles his chair around with his hands so that he is facing me. ‘Did I already say I’m real sorry about your daddy? He was a great guy. So clever it made my brains hurt. Funny. Loved you two girls a lot. But, what the hell were the police doing over at your place? Adam Holler had it from Bernard Dimoto that he drowned at Big Brim beach. Did he drown or didn’t he? I mean, will you tell me what’s going on?’

  I’d like to evade his question but can think of no way to do so.

  ‘Daddy’s death…’ I flounder and then borrow the phrase Jim used back in New York. ‘It wasn’t straightforward. The police say it’s homicide.’