by David Daniel
“Yours truly, in Fiji.” He said it longingly, as if it was a place he would prefer to be now.
“You’ve surfed a lot.”
“Every chance I get. I’ve broken some ribs, my right hand, lost teeth. Bruised my ego once or twice. Almost drowned a few times.”
“You make it sound awfully tempting.”
“It is.”
“I’ll stick to channel surfing. Tell me about Ben Nickerson back when. Is he in any of these?”
“No. And I don’t remember much.”
“You weren’t that close?”
“Get real. He was the class brain.” Van Owen was silent a moment, thinking, then laughed. “I caught him cheating off me on a test one time. A straight-A student, copying off my paper.”
“Maybe he hadn’t studied.”
“I’m no Rhodes scholar, Rasmussen.”
“You think he just wanted to fit in?”
“He didn’t know yet that he didn’t have to. A smart person … time takes care of them.”
Sometimes, I thought. Nickerson had married a pretty wife, though he’d lost her, too. And now she was wondering where he was. And where was Michelle? The food and wine had lulled me into a lethargy I didn’t want. I scrubbed a hand across my face. “Teddy Rand’s write-up in The Torch had him destined to be a mover and a shaker. Tell me about Teddy Rand.”
“What the hell’s that got to do with Nickerson?”
“Maybe nothing, but he seems a presence here.” I nodded at the wall of photographs.
He looked at them a moment, too. “Funny,” he said, “digging all this up. I’ve had these so long, they’re wallpaper. I don’t even see them anymore.”
“Maybe they want to speak.” Or maybe he did.
He didn’t hurry to tell it. We took seats, and he lit a cigarette. There was still daylight outside, but it was reddening. “We were born on the same date, one year apart. I was older, but I got kept back in sixth grade, so we were both going into tenth when his family moved down from the city. He transferred out of Boston Latin. That first summer, we became friends. You know the way it happens sometimes? You meet, and inside of five minutes you both know you can do or say or be anything you want, and it’s cool.”
I nodded. It was how I’d once felt with Ed St. Onge.
“We lifted and ran all summer—he had the best natural build on a kid I ever saw. He went out for football the first time ever that fall. I’d played through junior high. We both made varsity. First game of the year, his first play from scrimmage, he broke wide and went seventy yards. I’ll never forget it. He had this lazy, loping stride, deceptive as a bastard. He looked slow till you tried to close on him and then realized he was moving that fast. He scored a hundred points his first year, made All-Scholastic.”
“You made it, too. Led the league in sacks.”
“A year later. You already know all this?”
“I know it because there’s a young cop here who seems to think you were Sam Huff.”
He frowned. “His perception’s skewed. The town hasn’t fielded a decent team in years.”
“Is that where your nickname came from?” I hadn’t thought of the term since I’d played high school ball. I didn’t even know if it was still used.
“Coaches thought I was quick reading the opposing offense. Ha! I had all I could do to keep a half dozen of our plays in my head. No, it was this right-brain perception thing I have. Anyway, TJ knew Latin—from having gone to Latin school—so he made a link with Ben Nickerson, too. TJ was friendly with everyone. It was a knack he had.”
For making friends, Iva Rand had said.
“Teddy was smart and well-rounded. Three-sport letterman, student council.”
“Pretty girlfriend,” I added. “Good family.”
He blew smoke toward an open porthole. “He had it aced. And he was a nice guy, too. We stuck together. We double-dated, drank our first brews together. He graduated at the top of our class. He was headed for Dartmouth that fall, to get a degree and come back to run his old man’s business. That’s where that bit in The Torch came from.”
“Did you keep in touch?”
“Hold on. He was going Ivy League; I was maybe going to get into junior college. Instead I caught a dose of the teenage dumbs.” He waved a hand, dispersing smoke, and maybe his trouble along with it. “I borrowed a skiff without the owner’s permission and got it kind of sunk. The judge gave me an option of jail or the service. We had a president who was trying to make military duty glamorous again—the way these jokers who never got anywhere near a war like to do. We were dancing into that Panama bullshit, so what the hell? TJ tried to talk me out of it, said his father could get me a lawyer to fight it. I didn’t want lawyers. But he was really getting into it. He came up with all these ideas. The one he picked … I remember it so well.”
“You remember a lot of things well when you get going.”
He sent a look my way. “Some dipstick keeps reminding me.”
“Keep rolling.”
“We drove around half the night, TJ giving all these reasons why the U.S. shouldn’t be doing what it was doing, and how maybe we should all be pacifists, win hearts and minds. I think he was working it out for himself. We wound up on Shawmut Point. His folks had this old summer house out there. And we’re drinking—Scotch, I remember. Maybe because it’s an adult drink and we’re trying to make adult decisions. So we get out there and we finish the bottle, and TJ goes in his old man’s locker for more, and he comes out instead with this big-ass gun—his old man’s forty-five, which he kept for blasting rats. And TJ racks one into the chamber. It’s remote out there—pretty dead before Memorial Day. Anyway, he gets this plan. We go out in this old aluminum boat they kept out there, and we go out to the channel and cut the motor and drift. The idea is, he’ll shoot me in the leg—the fleshy part—so I can’t go in the army and probably won’t have to go to jail, either. But I say, very calm, like he’s not some maniac, ‘What about you? You think Dartmouth’s gonna want a guy who shot his best friend’?”
“These days there’d be a scholarship in it,” I said. “Adds diversity.”
“No shit. So he hands me the gun. He decides I’ll shoot him. It got crazy.”
“Never mind that a forty-five would blow your leg off and sink the boat. What happened?”
“I had a wicked hangover next day, and a few days after that I joined the Marines.”
“I thought you’d sobered up?”
“Yeah, well …”
“And TJ went to Dartmouth.”
He cast a glance out where a lobster boat was chugging westward on the sunset tide. For a long moment, he didn’t speak, watching the red flicker of wind on the water. “Man, how many times I’ve wished he had.”
I waited. He opened his mouth, shut it again. Finally he crushed out his cigarette. His chair creaked as he rose. “Let’s take a ride. I want to show you something.”
“Can’t you just tell me?”
“For Christ’s sake, Rasmussen, you started this.”
18
Actually, I had plans later to take up Ted Rand on his invitation, but I had started this, and now I was curious. Besides, a ride might do me good, knock the edge off the food and the alcohol. “Ever been to Brockton?” Van Owen asked when we were rolling west in his rattle-bang truck.
I had, once or twice, though it had been years since the last time. What textiles had been to Lowell, shoes had been to Brockton. All the major American manufacturers had operations there, but after World War II, shoe city had died hard, too—harder—with one outfit after another closing, broken down like some old brogan. Lowell had risen from the dead, but this was still a corpse from what I could see. I didn’t need a guided tour. Long ago the area had been called Hokomock and had seen the likes of great Indian warriors like Squanto and Massasoit. As Brockton, it had been home to men with cannonball muscles and tough spirits—Rocky Marciano and later Marvin Hagler both hailed from there—but the city was a husk of
what it had been, and when it made news at all it was unpleasant: one more senseless shooting or an administrator at the local community college hiring hookers to teach night classes. Out the truck window I could see soot-stained brick and curb-stoop gangs waiting for night. Without the surrounding presence of TJ Rand, I needed to prompt Van Owen to finish his tale.
“Does this still connect to Nickerson somehow?” he asked.
I hoped so, but I was no longer sure. According to Van Owen, when his friend could not come up with an absolute reason why he, TJ, shouldn’t be in uniform instead of Van Owen, he decided that the only honest thing to do was to enlist with him.
“He joined the Marines?”
“I told you he was nuts. He should’ve been running touchdowns on October afternoons for the simple reason that he was that good. And yet, I don’t know, it seemed … natural that he’d stuck with me.” He glanced my way, maybe looking for verification that TJ’s actions made any sense at all. “Whatever the case, he got into it. After a while, when a chance came to apply for officer training, he took it. Now I was the one telling him he was crazy. Let’s do the original tour, I said, and get the hell out. But he had his mind made up, stubborn bastard. After boot camp he went OCS, and I was a grunt. Then the president found this silly little hornet’s nest in Panama and decided it was time to make men out of boys.”
“You went?” I asked.
“I went to Pendleton. The San Onofre surf tour. My ass was safe the whole time. TJ went, though. When we both got out, we came back here. I didn’t go see him right away, though I knew he was already home. He was staying out at the Shawmut house. The second week I was back I took a ride out. His mother welcomed me. I remember him lying upstairs in this big old brass bed reading, and tossing the magazine aside—it was Rolling Stone, with Bob Seeger on the cover—and him saying, ‘What kept you, bro?’ And it was like nothing had changed. He didn’t look different—still had a hell of a build, only leaner—but stuff had changed. For both of us.” Van Owen’s voice had gone lower. “Remember that idea I told you? What he wanted me to do?”
“Shoot him in the leg?”
Van Owen glanced over at me. The shimmer of late-dying sunlight between trees and city buildings flickered across his face, like the speedup of all of his days. He looked weathered and worn. When he said nothing, a bad feeling crept over me. “What happened ?”
He slowed and turned past a sign that said BROCKTON VETERANS’ ADMINISTRATION HOSPITAL. He pulled into the parking lot, into a space underneath a maple tree. Ahead of us stood a four-story brick hospital wing. “Story’s almost done.” He lit a cigarette, doing it slow. “That day I visited him at home, we made a plan for a little surf trip—like old times. He’d got to be a pretty decent surfer for a guy who’d come from the city. Not smooth, but he was big and strong—he could push his way around in the water. A week later, we ended up out at Nauset on the Cape. This was September, and there was a tropical storm kicking up a surge. Biggest I’d ever seen. I hadn’t been to Fiji yet. Big rugged barrels this deep stone-green, danger written all over them. Eight to ten feet, I’m not kidding. Black-flag city. No one was supposed to go out, and no one was.”
Van Owen drew smoke and let it out in a slow breath. “There’s a simple way to figure out who a friend is. Say a guy gets the notion to do some crazy-ass, half-suicidal thing. You tell him, no way. You stop him if you can. But if he’s determined? You walk, right?”
“Unless he’s a friend,” I said.
“Friendship trumps all the rest—caution, responsibility, common sense. If those don’t work, you go along.” He set the cigarette in the dashboard tray and tugged back his hair, holding it there behind his head like a bundle of copper wire. It tightened the flesh of his face, which looked younger but still ravaged, and afraid, too. “Getting out was near to impossible. My arms were dead from paddling. I was just cresting a wall, and I saw him paddling way, way out. I went down in the pit, and when I rode up the next crest, I saw him take a wave. But something was off. There may have been a sandbar, or a rip current … the wave didn’t form right. It got all this big mass, but it looked bogus, I could see that from where I was. He couldn’t. And he didn’t have the water knowledge to read it right. I tried to flag him off. He came skidding down the wall, and I knew he was in for the ride. Then, just like that, it collapsed on him. Gone. I kept looking, frantic, man—but where do you look? You’ve got this whole ocean, and it keeps churning, wave after wave. You want to talk panic? Then his board shoots up into the air like a rocket, the broken leash dangling. No TJ.
“I dug hard to get to where the board had come up. Waves kept falling. I was freaking, never been so scared in my life. He’d been under a long time. I reached the spot and I prayed and I dove. I found him. Sheer chance. His leash had gotten tangled. I got him up. I have no recall of either of us getting back to shore.”
In the silence he took up his cigarette, sucked it back to life. “Someone called an ambulance. I broke ribs, busted up this hand.” He held it out, and I saw that the hand was misshapen. “TJ, on the other hand, he looked okay. It was a while before they figured his back was broken. It probably hadn’t done him any good me dragging him in, but that wasn’t the worst thing. He’d been under water too long. Without air, man …” He stared at the hospital building for a moment; then shifted his gaze, letting his eyes go wide and unfocused. “He’s up there. Fourth floor, C Wing, room four-oh-six.”
I waited for him to get out, but he didn’t move. “Aren’t you going in?”
“What for?”
I looked at him, trying to understand. He started the truck. “I’ve never been. Never will. There are times,” he said, “I wish he’d just die.”
We had little to say on the ride back to the boat. He let me off, and as I unlocked my car, I thought of something. I went back over. “When you visited TJ at home that first time, after you were both back from the service—you said he was different. How?”
“I don’t know, just was.”
“Was it bravado, going out in the waves like that? Some reckless thrill?”
“What’re you asking? Was he a gung-ho marine with a death wish? Bull. If anything, he was quieter than he’d used to be, more subdued.”
I considered this a moment. “Was this before or after Ginny Carvalho drowned?”
He frowned. “After. She’d died the previous June. Who the hell are you supposed to be now, a shrink?”
“No. Thanks for dinner.”
Back at the beach house I experienced a letdown in my energy. The drinks had leached some of it away, but I also felt I’d been spinning down avenues that might lie beyond where I needed to be. It was as if Standish were pulling me into its own elliptical orbit. There had been an intensity to the day that had sneaked up on me, and now I was sinking. Van Owen’s tale and the trip to the VA hospital had been the hammer blow. I craved sleep, though I knew if I succumbed, it would be impossible to get moving again. My perception of time running away from me had returned. It was eight-fifteen. I checked my answering service, and there was a message from an hour ago from Paula Jensen. It was marked urgent.
She sounded glad to hear from me. “I talked to the accountant that I mentioned. It turns out he hasn’t worked for Ben for over a year now—Ben fired him. Evidently they had a disagreement over Ben’s tax filings, but he wouldn’t get specific. Does that mean anything?”
“It’s interesting,” I said. “It may mean that Nickerson’s business is in trouble.”
“But Ben’s got clients all over the country.”
“So did Polaroid. It’s just a theory, but what if he came east with an idea of saving his business, with raising some cash?”
“Holding Shel for ransom?”
“I haven’t gone that far with it yet.”
“He could’ve just asked me for money.”
“I think he did. He presented your husband with an investment opportunity, but he never gave Ross any details, and Ross declined. Ben told Van O
wen he’d pay for the surfboard when he got here, that money wouldn’t be a problem. Didn’t he give you the same idea about reimbursing you for the rental on this place?”
“Well … he wasn’t the greatest businessman.” She sounded shaken by the idea that I was laying out. “He was wonderful with the science end, but in the early days, when we were building the business, I was the people person. Frankly, I thought he should have stuck with teaching; that was his gift. But that’s all hindsight, isn’t it? Alex … where’s Shelly?”
I told her I was trying to find out. When we’d signed off, I got a number for the Cape Way Motor Lodge and called there. It rang several times before a scratchy answering machine tape kicked on. A woman’s voice said that I had reached the Cape Way Motor Lodge in historic Standish, Massachusetts, that rooms were available, et cetera. The only thing historic was the recording, but despite the poor quality, I recognized the voice. I hung up and got the local number for the Storm Warning, which I called and caught Fran Albright in person. I reminded her who I was and what I was doing.
“Oh, yes,” she said tentatively.
“I’d like to speak with you about your sister.”
“About Ginny?”
“Yes, with you and maybe with your father.”
“I don’t know how much help I can be, but Dad and I will be at home later.”
“Can I call then?”
“My father’s not comfortable with the telephone. Why don’t you come out? We’re on Route Fifty-three, in the little house right behind the Motor Lodge. Could you be there at nine-fifteen?”
I took a fast shower and changed into a tan summer-weight suit, pale blue shirt. I hesitated over the assortment of ties I’d brought. Ted Rand had said to bring a bathing suit to his soiree, so I wasn’t sure of protocols. One of the things—one of the many—I had loved about being married to Lauren was her unfailing sense of protocol. Okay, it isn’t think-tank research, and I manage it myself now, but I’m never quite sure. When she told me, I always listened. I’d listened, too, when she advised me to forget about whether people believed I’d taken a bribe when I was a cop; what mattered was that I knew I hadn’t. I should get on with my life—our lives—she said. I’d listened, but had I taken her advice? Too late now. I settled on a blue-and-gold-striped rep.