Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  ‘When your father’s killed it makes you ask questions.’

  ‘Does Detective MacFarlane know that you’re here?’

  ‘No one knows I’m here.’

  For a moment he looks at me with distress and, ridiculously, I want to cry because this stranger, however briefly, has shared my grief. He says: ‘I’m sorry. There didn’t seem anything too unusual out on the freeway that night. Your father didn’t look like a guy in trouble. But if he was… then… gee, I’m sorry, real sorry.’

  From Bellamy I drive down the coast a little way. The road follows all the twists and turns of the tortuous coastline but the traffic speeds up when it reaches the long, straight stretch by Big Brim. This must be the least popular beach in the area. The parking lot where Rougemont left his car right by mine is almost empty. Only two cars and a tow truck.

  A tow truck. At Big Brim. Antique in appearance, chrome-covered, its silver arm pointing skywards like a shark’s fin. I brake and swing around in a U-turn. The driver behind me honks and his passengers stare after me and so does the car behind and the car behind that.

  I pull in by the tow truck and, rocked by the wind of each passing car, I walk around it twice. Far from monstrous, it seems to me small and battered with age. Its chrome sparkles playfully in the sunshine. The network of crane and winch piled on to its back has the solidity of another era. Its numberplates are yellow on black. The make of the truck is obscure because so many letters have fallen from its name. Diver or Divine, maybe. There is no garage name although the remnant of one is almost visible on the driver’s door. The truck is so aged that I suspect it is still on the road only through good luck and constant tinkering and I am reminded, suddenly, forcibly, of Daddy and the Oldsmobile.

  I find a map in the hirecar and on the back of it write the shadow names along with the truck’s number and a few notes on its wheels and colours. I examine the tyres, running my fingers down one zigzag tread. The truck is harmless without its driver. The driver is powerless without his truck. I look across the road at the dunes. My heart beats with the speed of a hunter who is close to his quarry.

  During a pause in the traffic I dart across the blacktop. I take off my shoes and my feet are rapidly submerged, almost to my ankles, in sand. It resists every step. It tells me to go back. I ignore its warnings and move on resolutely, my whole body leaning forward where my legs should be. Much slower than I want to, I drag each foot towards the sea. And all the time I am looking for him, looking for the driver of the tow truck, until when I reach the third dune it seems to me that there has always been a tow truck driver in my life, terrifying me, carrying away those I love most, evading me whenever I turn to confront him.

  I look across the beach. The pear-shaped man and his little dog are here again. Two women, jogging slowly. A mother with a small gaggle of children surging around her. A few dogs in the sea, their owners watching them. And then I see him. He is alone on the dunes and is perhaps a fourth of a mile away. A man, tall, dark, probably young. He is heading towards the road and almost certainly the tow truck but he has misjudged the beach’s length and he is crossing the dunes a fourth of a mile too far north. I see him from the top of the third dune and he is already nearing the top of the first. I watch him. He is not humbled by the effort of walking here. He marches up the dune with resolution.

  At the dune’s pinnacle he pauses and something makes him turn. He turns right around until he has turned to me. He stops. We stare at one another across billions of grains of undulating sand. I know he knows I am looking for him. We stare, too far for eyes, too far for faces. Then he turns again. He has only to descend one dune and walk along the roadside for a fourth of a mile.

  I run back down the dune I just climbed and start to ascend the second. My whole body works against the sand, my toes, my neck, my head. The sand seems to suck at my legs, my feet are weights, my arms saw at the air. When I reach the top of the dune nearest the road, my heart still thumping the hunter’s thump, every cell in my body still focused on my quarry, I look at once at the parking lot. I am already too late. The dark figure had only to run along the road and he would have reached his truck before I was down the second dune. I imagine the monstrous growl of its old engine, the whine of the transmission, the roar as he accelerated into the traffic.

  19

  I sit down on the baking sand. I stare at the place the tow truck stood. It was an answer, an explanation, and now there is only a void.

  When I retrace my route across the dunes I move slowly this time, slowly enough to feel the sand scorching the soles of my feet. I run down the last dune to the beach and, when the sand is firm and damp underfoot, I put down my shoes and walk right on to the sea. It is docile here, like a blue lagoon. I walk up to the water in a straight line and pause when I feel the ice of its touch at my toes.

  ‘Hey!’ shouts a voice. ‘Hey, you, yes you!’ I turn. A large, amorphous shape is walking, half running, towards me, his tiny dog racing alongside him. He carries some curiously shaped driftwood under his arm. As he gets closer I can see his cheeks bouncing on his face, his belly wobbling with his walk, the water-bottle secured around his waist leaping up and down. When he reaches me, he is too breathless to speak.

  ‘Gee,’ he wheezes. ‘Gee, just wait a minute, will you?’

  He pulls at the water-bottle, throws back his head and pours liquid into his open mouth.

  ‘I want you to know that this is water. Not beer or bourbon or any of that kind of stuff,’ he puffs. He rolls his eyes virtuously but his mouth is moulding itself into distressed shapes. I wonder what has upset him. Perhaps he is habitually upset.

  ‘I want you to know something else as well. That mostly when guys yell after you on beaches, they’re crazy and you should run away. That’s usually the case. But it’s not the case with me.’

  I stand with my hands on my hips. ‘Good. What’s the problem?’

  ‘I have to tell you something. I need to warn you. Point A. The tide comes up real fast. When it comes. Right now it’s going the other way. Point B. This looks like it might be a good place to swim. Gently shelving. Calm waters. But the reason it doesn’t get the big waves is that there are these currents. They’re unique. Very special. Caused by the sand spits at each end. Oceanographers come here to study the currents though all they have to do is ask a fisherman. Anyway, it means this beach is no good, I repeat, no good, not safe, bad news, for swimming. I just thought you should know that.’

  He has been wagging his finger from side to side.

  ‘Thanks. Actually, I already knew. I heard about a baby who drowned here a long time ago.’

  ‘Ooooh, that’s too bad. This is not a good beach for a kid to swim. It looks great, but it’s not, it’s the worst.’

  ‘He was only a baby.’

  The man looks at me uncertainly and then takes another gulp of water. ‘How’d he drown then? His mom take him in the water?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is that why you came here today, lady?’

  I make shapes in the sand with my toes. They trail through the tiny grains making a pattern like a maze or some ancient hieroglyphic.

  ‘Okay, okay, you don’t have to answer. We can present ourselves with a series of choices at this point. Choice Number One. We can sit here and have a pleasant talk and you can tell me what’s the problem. Choice Number Two. I can turn right around and go back to my house and you can do whatever you want to do when I am no longer around to see it but I should state here and now that I do not vote for choice number two. Choice Number Three. You can decide that you want to remove yourself, right now, from this beach to the parking lot, without talking to me at all. If you opt for choice number three I will no way take offence.’

  The sea breeze ruffles my hair. The man’s hair is thick and brown and the breeze blows it upright like cartoon hair.

  The man says: ‘Do you need me to run over those choices again?’

  ‘No. You’ve made a mistake.’
/>   He looks at me, wide-eyed. ‘You know more choices?’

  ‘You thought I intended to commit suicide. Right?’

  He studies the sand bashfully. ‘Well… it’s the way you put your shoes right down and then walked towards the ocean in a straight line. That’s what they generally do.’ His eyes look back at me but he does not lift his head. He’s shy now. ‘I mean… weren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘My father was found dead in the water a little way down the coast one week ago. He left his clothes right here on the beach.’

  The man grits his teeth and throws his head back as though he’s been burnt.

  ‘Oooooh, gee. Gee. That guy. The one they’re saying was a homicide. That guy was your father?’

  ‘Did you see him?’

  His vast, rubbery features model and remodel themselves into contours of unhappiness. ‘Nah. I didn’t see anyone. That’s how I know he wasn’t here.’

  ‘He died last Monday morning. The police think he died at eight.’

  ‘Uh-huh. He didn’t die here.’

  I stare at the man. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m generally on patrol by seven,’ he explains. ‘No one was on the beach that morning. I already told the police.’

  ‘But his clothes were found here.’

  ‘No clothes here at eight o’clock. I mean, I didn’t walk right down the beach but I’d have seen them. I live at the other end, I’m the only person who can get here without crossing three dunes.’

  ‘Who found his clothes?’

  ‘Me ’n’ Cinnamon.’ The dog, which has flopped on to the nearest dry sand, looks up when it hears its name and then flops back down. ‘I went home at eight-thirty for a cup of coffee and I came out at nine-thirty just like today and that’s when I saw the clothes. I called the police and they came. Boy, they sure hate coming over the dunes in their uniforms.’

  The man walks up the beach a few paces and then sits down next to his dog, his legs sprawling towards the ocean. Cinnamon puts his head on the man’s knee. I sit down too and my hand begins to trace more shapes in the sand. Complicated shapes. Mazes. Aztec mazes, Inca mazes.

  ‘So someone put my father’s clothes here after he died,’ I say at last. It’s more of a statement than a question but the man nods agreement.

  ‘Correct. Or, the medical examiner got the time of death wrong. They can do that. If your father died on this beach while I was having my cup of coffee then… I’m sorry.’ And when I look up his mouth is pulling in all directions, speaking some sad, silent language of its own.

  ‘Who was on the beach when you came out of your house at nine-thirty?’ I ask. He gestures to the widely-spaced assortment of walkers, mostly with dogs.

  ‘The same sort of people that are here today. No one suspicious or unusual. No one I could specifically describe.’

  ‘There was a man here this morning. Tall, dark, alone, no dog. He must have left about ten minutes before you saw me…’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Just what you did. Looked up the beach, looked down the beach. Walked right up to the sea and stood there like he was planning to go in. Saw me coming and went right away again.’

  ‘Did you notice anything about him?’

  ‘Tall, dark, like you said.’

  ‘What sort of age?’

  He lies back in the sand.

  ‘I can’t tell ages any more. He was about like you.’

  ‘What was he wearing?’

  ‘Jeans.’

  ‘Did you notice anything else at all?’

  The man sighs enormously. ‘I moved right towards him just in case but he backed off. Probably he didn’t mean to do anything. I’ve been patrolling this beach a few years now and I’m pretty good at judging these things.’

  I ask: ‘So, what happened to you?’

  ‘Whaddya mean, lady?’

  ‘How come you patrol this beach?’

  He sighs.

  ‘You’re right, something did happen. See, I used to be a truck driver.’ He offers this as though it’s some kind of explanation. I look at him, stretched out in loose sweat pants over the sand, and I see how, over the long miles, his big soft body gradually moulded itself into the shape of his truck seat.

  ‘Then I stopped being a driver and started in the truck hire business. Big risks, I learned to bite my nails. But I was successful when I was only forty-one, I mean, successful enough to have other people run the business for me so I can do this.’

  He sits up. His back is rounded and his head hangs.

  ‘I ran over this guy once. Cows, sheep, when you’re driving through grasslands down in the foothills of the Rockies, that’s normal, you get used to that. But a man…’

  He scratches his head vigorously, like a child learning to write who’s trying to scratch out some error. ‘I can tell you, I thought I’d never get over it. Night after night I’d dream about what I saw in my windscreen.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘Well, this is a popular place for people to end their lives and I try to persuade them otherwise. I mean, maybe some of them go off and do it some other place but I feel like I’m still saving a few and making up a little for what I did. I sure wish I could have saved your father but I really don’t think he died at Big Brim.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘Nah. He went in at Seal Wash. Just maybe Bellamy but there are restaurants along the facing cliff and someone would have seen. So my money’s on Seal Wash.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘An informed guess. Based on what I know about the currents. Based on what the fishermen say. Your dad was found off Retribution and there are currents from here but there are also some which go right there from Bellamy and Seal Wash and it’s easy to… well, the road runs real close to the water. ’Specially on the clifftop at Seal Wash.’

  Daddy’s body plummeting from the clifftop into the depths of the blue ocean beneath. A splash. A splash which would be loud enough in a swimming-pool but here in the ocean it would seem nothing more than the crash of a small wave on a small rock.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks the man.

  I nod.

  ‘That’s only a theory. Maybe I made myself that theory because I feel so bad to think I could’ve missed him. I only miss a few.’

  I smile to reassure him. I know it’s not a good smile, that I’ve just pulled my mouth into a straight line with maybe a wrinkle or two at the edges, but it’s the best I can do right now. The small, wiry-haired dog has crawled over to me, his expression obsequious, and is nuzzling me now. I stroke his ears and he rolls on to his back for me to scratch his belly.

  ‘Aw, Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a softee,’ says the man affectionately.

  I ask: ‘Can you remember where his clothes were?’

  The man sighs and looks up and down the beach. ‘Just right around here, I guess, but back up towards the dunes. That’s unusual, see, if he was a suicide. People generally leave their clothes nearer the water.’

  I stand up and dust the sand off myself and the breeze picks it up and blows it a little way along the beach.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’

  He looks up at me doubtfully.

  ‘You okay now?’ he asks.

  ‘I didn’t come here to kill myself. Really.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ he agrees but I can tell he still believes that I did.

  20

  At Seal Wash the sea today is restless as a hungry animal. The black rocks which jut from the ocean’s depth look more menacing than they did on Tuesday and when water sloshes against the cliffs it throws spray high into the air.

  You could park a car so that the passenger side was almost at the edge of the cliff and, with a little dragging and pulling, you could dump something inanimate, a bag of rocks, a human body, right into the ocean. Of course, it would
get battered along the way but neither the splash nor the spray would be remarkable and the object, that is, the bag of rocks or the human body, would soon be lost in the vast, deep blueness.

  There is the crash of an immense wave and a few moments later I feel the ocean’s damp cloth on my face.

  Or maybe Daddy got right out of the car, Daddy and his killer, someone known to him, with whom he was relaxed, talking. When Daddy was looking away, the killer acted. If you pushed someone off the cliff here, you couldn’t be completely sure they would die. The sea looks fierce but a strong swimmer might get to the safety of a nearby rock. No, as the medical examiner said, Daddy was dead when the rocks bruised and scratched him, dead when his body toppled down the cliff. Did his killer watch the freefall of the body, listen for the splash? Or did he get right back into the car and drive rapidly away to Big Brim beach? Few people were around. He dumped Daddy’s clothes near the dunes, further from the water than a swimmer might, but he wanted to minimize the risk of being seen. Then, sweating, his heart beating with exertion, did he return to his car and drive away?

  ‘I know what you’re thinking and I agree with you,’ says a voice.

  I spin right around and a long arm is extended to steady me. Michael Rougemont grasps me with his bony fingers.

  ‘Don’t get too close to the edge!’ His eyes are so wide that they’re staring and, even though I know he’s serious, he looks comical.

  ‘Are you following me?’ I demand, stepping inland. His grip loosens and his arms drop. I see his car parked on the other side of the clifftop.

  ‘I’m probably here for the same reason you are. You’re thinking that your father died at Seal Wash and I agree with that. Maybe he didn’t even go to Big Brim beach. So we wasted our time drinking in the atmosphere there at sunset on Tuesday.’

  ‘Those cuts and bruises on his face –’

  Rougemont looks down at the black rocks protruding like bad teeth from the sea.