by Lynn Kostoff
At eye-level to his right, between the sink and refrigerator, was a calendar topped by a glossy colored photograph of a dramatic series of rapids, all dark jutting rocks and white veils of spume, and a heavy salmon suspended like an apostrophe mid-leap above them.
Jack Carson looked at the month and ran his fingers over the days.
“Look, we’ve already covered this ground,” a woman said. “You need to come straight home from school and watch your grandfather.”
On the other side of the kitchen was a brown-haired woman in a starched white shirt and dark blue jeans. She held a compact in her palm and tilted its cover so that the mirror let her follow the path of the make-up she was applying.
Below her, at the kitchen table, was a girl sitting in front of a bowl of cereal. Her hair was ponytailed tight against her scalp. Hanging from the back of her chair was a red and blue bookbag.
“Jennifer’s,” she said, pointing her spoon at the woman. “I was supposed to go over to her place after school. It’s important.”
The brown-haired woman said something about a Mrs. Wood and her having to leave early so that Paige needed to come home right after school.
“It’s not like Jennifer asks just anyone over to her house,” the girl said. “Her dad’s a surgeon, and her mother’s beautiful enough to be a model.”
The brown-haired woman said she was sorry and then turned to Jack. “Dad, it’s what, the second, third, time I’ve told you to get dressed, and you’re still in your bathrobe? I laid out clothes.”
“What does it matter?” the girl said. “It’s not like…” Her voice broke off, and she shrugged.
“It matters,” the woman said. “It matters that your grandfather gets dressed every day. It matters that you don’t talk in front of him as if he isn’t here.”
The girl shook her head. “He ruins everything. You know he does, and you’re just pretending not.”
“That’s enough, Paige.” The woman angled the tube of lipstick and went back to work on her mouth. She paused and looked over at Jack. “Dad, please, get dressed.”
“If my father were here, he’d just leave all over again,” the girl said.
The woman snapped the compact closed. She was pretty, but had sad eyes. Jack suddenly remembered her name and who she was.
There was a short blast of a horn. “The bus, Paige,” Anne said. The girl grabbed her bookbag and slammed out of the house without a goodbye.
“I’ll find him,” Jack said.
“Who?”
“The one the girl was talking about.” Jack waited, and the name bumped into view. “Raymond.”
“Oh Dad,” Anne said. “We’ve been over this. It’s been over three years. He’s not coming back.”
“He needs to do the right thing,” Jack said. In Trouble. That’s how Jack thought of it and then immediately felt ashamed because there was something fundamentally dishonest about the phrase. It was the equivalent of saying passed instead of died.
In Trouble. That’s what they called it when Jack was younger. You got a girl in trouble.
Anne walked over and took Jack by the arm and led him through the living room and down a hall. They stopped and turned into a bedroom.
“Claude Rains,” Jack said, pointing at the clothes on the bed. Anne looked over, puzzled.
A set of clothes was laid out on top of the covers. Jack said it looked as if the Invisible Man were taking a nap.
“Please,” Anne said, handing Jack the pants. Then she left, closing the door behind her. After a while, he heard the doorbell and then Anne talking to someone named Mrs. Wood.
Jack unbelted the bathrobe and started to get dressed.
It struck Jack that he lived in a house full of women’s voices.
He got his pants on and his shirt buttoned halfway and then sat on the edge of the bed and hunted down his shoes. He looked out the bedroom window. It overflowed with pale morning light. He picked up his left shoe. He looked at the closed door and listened to the faint voices of the women drifting down the hall.
At that moment, Jack Carson understood what was happening to him. Even if, right then, he could not name the condition, he recognized what it felt like.
It felt like each moment of what he’d once been able to call his life were being reshuffled over and over like a deck of cards.
It was like standing in front of a door, then bending over the lock with a fat wad of keys and trying one by one to fit them and having to start over again and again because all the keys were the same size and shape and color.
It was like a magician who’d lost control of his magic, who knew the moves for each trick but had lost the ability to manipulate the outcome anymore, the tricks tricking him now.
It was like standing behind the wheel of a boat, far out at sea and waiting, against the immensity of the horizon, for the anchor you’d dropped to catch, but knowing through your fingertips on the wheel that it hadn’t, that in the depths below the hull, the anchor drifted and dragged, unable to find purchase.
And it was like standing in the kitchen before an open cabinet, and the item he needed was on the uppermost shelf, and as he stretched for it, his fingertips brushed against but could not grasp what he needed, and he ended up pushing it further back each time he tried, until finally it was out of reach, his fingers grabbing air.
Jack got up from the bed and started looking for his other shoe.
FIFTEEN
THIS MONTH it was Initiative.
Last month it had been Concern.
Ben Decovic could chart his ten months with the Magnolia Beach Police Department with the appearance of each bumper sticker the state of South Carolina issued for the blue and whites. He’d started out with Honesty, rode for thirty days with Sharing, and moved on to Responsibility and Duty and then continued with Compassion, Integrity, Faith, and Sacrifice.
The black and white bumper stickers bothered him in a way he could not quite put his finger on, the stickers evoking the same type of ambivalence he felt whenever he encountered another of South Carolina’s favorite practices, that of putting Jesus on the plates of seemingly every other car or truck on the road. The point of it all seemed either too obvious or opaque to make any real sense.
Ben had been working the three-to-eleven and had an hour to go on his shift. He worked his way through the lots of the strip malls and businesses off Atlantic Avenue, most of them closed or about to.
On his way out of the Walgreens lot, he spotted Carl Adkin climbing out of his patrol car at the 7-11 across the street. Ben waved. Adkin looked over at him for a moment, then nodded, pausing near the front doors and flipping open his cell phone.
The Passion Palace was three blocks farther down the street and Ben’s last stop before returning to headquarters. There was nothing particularly palatial about the Palace. It was flat-roofed with no front windows and constructed of cement blocks spruced up with a paint job that vacillated between lavender and pink under the two hooded mercury lights out front. There was a portable billboard streetside that simply read LIVE GIRLS and MEMBERS ONLY, the latter, Ben knew, taken care of by a twenty dollar bill at the door.
There were two Passion Palaces, the other in North Myrtle Beach, a small but lucrative skin kingdom overseen by Sonny Gramm, who also had controlling interests in a half-dozen adult video stores as well as ownership of a supper club and three restaurants popular with tourists who equated gargantuan buffets of all-you-could-eat deep-fried food with a meal.
One of the bouncers at the Palace, Terry, was standing outside the front door smoking a cigarette. Ben stopped and rolled down his window and asked how things were going.
“Other than the fact that my girlfriend has a major-league yeast infection and Sonny pink-slipped me tonight, the world is a fine and wonderful place, Officer.”
“Gramm cut you loose?”
Terry nodded. “Five years, I’ve been working for him. Then bam, he does this.” Terry lifted his head and blew a stream of smoke over the ro
of of the blue and white. “He’s doing the same thing at the other places. Cutting back to one bouncer and thinning out the ranks of the waitresses. Then kicking up the hours and duties of the ones who are still around.”
Terry looked over and down at Ben. “Money problems. That’s all he talks about now.” He shook his head. “Used to be a nice guy, Sonnwy. You did your job, you got a decent paycheck, a comp on drinks, he had you out for parties at his place, but the last few months, he’s Scrooged-out large-scale. The whole thing sucks, man.”
“What’s that?” Ben asked, leaning his head out the window.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Terry said.
“That,” Ben said. From the rear of the Palace came a mix of sounds, metal on glass, metal on metal, loud voices.
“I told you, I don’t hear anything,” Terry said. “I think something happened to my ears after I got pink-slipped. They’re not working right tonight.”
Ben called in the disturbance and requested backup. On more than one occasion, some of the patrons of the Palace got a little out of hand near closing. Whatever was going on didn’t sound good. Adkin radioed that he was on the way and to wait for him before proceeding.
The sounds continued, the volume rising and spiking.
Ben took the blue and white toward the rear parking lot.
When he made the corner of the building, he saw Frank, the other bouncer, fly out the back door of the Palace and run toward a knot of people in the southeast corner of the lot, most of them yelling and hooting and scattering at Frank’s approach and the sight of the cruiser.
Then suddenly, Frank wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
Ben wasn’t sure if he’d been knocked down or had gotten lost running after some of the hecklers. The source of the noise, however, was now very apparent.
A thin man in a black sleeveless t-shirt was methodically working over Sonny Gramm’s vintage ’68 Mustang with a crowbar. He was wearing a cheap plastic mask, a Halloween Lucifer. The hood of the car looked like a rumpled sheet of aluminum foil. The front windshield, as well as the headlights, was already a memory.
Ben looked around for his backup, hit the siren, and climbed out of the front seat, cutting across the lot at a diagonal and yelling at the guy to put the crowbar down.
It seemed to be a night for hearing problems. The guy ignored Ben and continued pounding the Mustang.
Ben again yelled for the guy to stop. Same results.
He drew his Glock, carefully moving among the parked cars. The guy in the black T-shirt and devil mask was Meth-scrawny and looked to have unlimited reserves of energy. He brought the crowbar down again and again in an unvarying rhythm. The Mustang was well on its way to scrap.
Then three things happened in quick succession.
Ben moved around a blue Taurus and stepped on Frank’s, the bouncer’s, hand. The guy in the black T-shirt suddenly quit with the crowbar action and looked over what was left of the car’s roof and waved. Then Kermit the Frog popped up and punched Ben in the throat.
Ben rolled over and was halfway to his feet when the guy in the Kermit mask hit him again.
As he went down, Ben caught the lower edge of the mask, momentarily pulling it away before it snapped back in place.
Ben lifted his head and then his right arm. The short man in the Kermit mask, however, was already in the middle of his swing, this time bringing a dark object up and over his shoulder and catching Ben’s wrist, knocking the semi-automatic from his hand.
The guy swung again, hard, the object whistling through its trajectory and rattling like a pocketful of loose change when it made contact with Ben’s forearm.
Ben heard himself yell, and then he was on the ground, lightning running the length of his arm and his nerve endings short-circuiting, his fingers instantly going numb.
The guy leaned over and snatched Ben’s Glock. He turned and hollered something to the guy in the black t-shirt and devil mask.
A couple moments later, the two of them took off running.
Ben tried to move his fingers. His arm twitched and jumped.
He had just managed to get to his knees when the backup arrived. He tried to catch their attention, point out the direction the two had taken off in, but there was too much going on.
Lee—Ben couldn’t remember if it was his first or last name— made it over first. Ben gave him the gist, and Lee sprinted back to his patrol car to put in the call to alert other officers about the two men on foot.
Adkin checked on Frank. The EMS people arrived.
Ben put his left arm along the fender of the Taurus and slowly worked to a standing position. Residual pain still ghosted the length of his arm, but nothing seemed to be broken.
At his feet was a large gray athletic sock with a mound of heavy gauge washers spilling from its mouth.
A paramedic examined Ben and said he needed to go back for X-rays, but Ben said it could wait. He asked about the bouncer and was told Frank had a probable concussion and a definite broken jaw. Three patrolmen were working follow-up with witnesses from the crowd who’d been in the lot earlier. Another bagged the sock and washers. Others radioed in, passing on the news that there was no news. The two guys who’d taken off on foot were still on the loose.
Carl Adkin walked over. “You ok, Decovic?”
“What the fuck took you so long?”
“What do you mean?”
“You heard me.”
“I got here as soon as I could.” Adkin fired up a cigarette.
“You’re lying. You should have been primary backup. You couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks away. I saw you at the 7-ll off Atlantic.”
Adkin jetted a stream of smoke. “You called. I told you I was on the way. You should have waited.”
Ben tried to remember what he’d overheard about Adkin around the department. Nothing came to mind except a few stray references. Adkin, an all-state cornerback in high school who couldn’t cut it in college. A stint in the Marines. A sour marriage to a high school sweetheart. A couple of kids. Superior ratings on the pistol range. Adkin, raising and selling pitbulls on the side.
“I went in expecting backup,” Ben said. He winced and cradled his throbbing forearm. “You left me hanging. I’m writing this one up.”
Adkin dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. “I told you to wait. There was a reason. I need to spell it out for you?” He made a show of incredulously shaking his head.
“Maybe you should.”
“It looks,” Adkin said after a moment, “that you’re a guy bears watching.”
“That works both ways,” Ben said.
“That’s how we’re going to play this?”
Ben nodded.
Adkin smiled.
“Ask anyone. I’m a regular guy.” Adkin walked over to his cruiser and squatted near the right front fender. “Primary backup’s late on the scene,” he said, “all sorts of things could happen to the officer already there. I’d never leave a fellow officer hanging. He’s counting on me, right?”
Adkin took out a pocketknife and slid it into the front tire, then worked it around before folding the blade and standing up.
“Still going to write me up, Decovic?” he asked, walking over. “I told you, the call came in and I’m here as soon as I could. My fault, a tire’s going flat on me? Thing like that, it could happen to anybody.”
“You son of a bitch.” Ben gingerly moved his arm. His nerve endings felt like an overturned anthill.
“A flat, something like that, it happens,” Adkin said. “Couldn’t be helped.”
Behind them in the parking lot, Sonny Gramm, the owner of the Passion Palace, circled his ruined Mustang and bellowed, bringing down God’s curse on them all.
SIXTEEN
CORRINE TEDROS kept catching red lights. She was on Queensland Avenue, the main east-west artery connecting Route 17 to downtown Magnolia Beach, and no matter how much she adjusted her speed or took the Lexus through lane changes, she ended up beneath
a traffic signal stuck on red, her knuckles steadily whitening on the wheel.
Both sides of Queensland were stacked and packed with standard-issue commercial-strip clutter, a free-zone sprawl of fast food chains, car dealerships, minimalls, grocery stores, and outsized department and hardware stores, the clutter steadily thinning the closer you got to downtown where, like so much else in Magnolia Beach, development was still boom or bust.
Magnolia Beach was like something half-birthed. When Corrine had moved there with Buddy, she had liked that quality. Half-birthed was protective coloration. She lived in a place that was simultaneously disappearing and emerging, a place where she was known and not known. A place where the future lunched on its own history.
Outside, the ambient light on Queensland pushed back dusk. Corrine cut to the left and passed a blue and white pickup belching exhaust and whose bed was filled with a half-dozen Mexican day laborers in white Tshirts and black caps. The radio held the local news, most of which was underwritten by the sis-boom-bah boosterism of the city’s tourist bureau.
A green Camry with out-of-state plates suddenly pulled into her lane. Corrine hit the brakes. A block later, she caught another red. She listened to a news story about the string of fires that had been appearing around and just inside the city limits. So far they had all been quickly contained, but the Fire Marshall had issued a county-wide burn alert due to the unseasonably high temperatures and critically dry spring. The announcer said there was an ongoing investigation as to the origin of the fires.
Corrine hit the Off button. In the right lane, a man in a dark blue Mercedes convertible pointedly smiled at her. It was seven-thirty.
Buddy and his pals would just be looking at menus, getting ready to order supper.
Supper at the Oyster Emporium followed by a private bachelor party in one of the back rooms at Sonny Gramm’s Passion Palace. The groom-to-be, Danny Demiotos; Buddy his best man.
The bride-to-be, Angie Trankopolous, had not asked Corrine to be part of the wedding party.
Corrine got the point. Stanley Tedros was a pal of Angie’s father and had tugged on a few strings to make sure Corrine was excluded and to make sure she got the subtext, which was Corrine was not Greek and forever would be on the outside.