by Maria Flook
Bell was living at home again with his mother and his sister, Christine, coming back to Newport after three months in a Navy brig at Portsmouth, Virginia. He had hoped to wrangle some duty in his hometown. He asked for the Construction Battalion Unit, where he could do his hitch building piers or grouting the swimming pools on base. Instead, he had been assigned to the Naval Supply Center in Norfolk. He never shipped out. He worked on a terminal in the bowels of a warehouse, cataloguing dry goods and food supplies for the carriers. He couldn’t tell the weather, what clouds scumbled overhead, tinting the sea. All day he was under the fluorescents.
He began to do some pilfering. It wasn’t much, just what he could get into his Plymouth once or twice over weekend liberty. Mostly it was cases of cigarettes, which he sold to Richmond Vending. After his time in the brig, he wasn’t surprised by the general discharge. Its abrupt language was stinging, even without being accusatory. In just two lines of print it was all over.
He tried to adjust to hours in his mother’s house—scents from the kitchen, yeast cakes soaking, knotted rolls swelling like broken knuckles, the floor always gritty with cinnamon sugar. He hated to hear the same low thump of the radiator building with steam, the pipes knocking room to room, and then subsiding. All of his old haunts flipped before his eyes like lantern slides or stereoscopic pictures: the old Viking Look Out Tower, the Mount Hope Bridge with its green lanterns, then the Providence skyline, the State House with its needle spire injecting the horizon. The vision of the drowned woman was a refreshing surge, washing through the ordinary furnishings and clutter in his childhood house.
The crowd on the beach had adjusted to the visual impact. One man questioned the idea of an actual drowning—the woman could have been dumped. Someone said she must be a Boston whore down for the weekend. Bell knew that there were always illicit odd jobs during the off-season, when summer boutiques fell back on drug trafficking. Motel bars hired girls to do some modeling; they arranged elevated runways by just lining up three or four billiard tables. One or two video pioneers manufactured hard-core tapes, working out of the Sheraton, and the same up at the Ramada. Bell’s stomach was still empty, but he wasn’t hungry. He felt weighted, almost sleepy; the abrasive slushing of the waves over the beaded dress was hypnotic. Because the woman had washed ashore so close to his house, he couldn’t resist thinking it might be a commentary on his arrival. He studied her body. Bell saw she had a little mole halfway up her thigh, just at the hem of her short dress. He saw it, then flicked his gaze farther out. It was restful to study the horizon, letting it snag and scurry. Then he looked back at the woman.
An emergency vehicle drove up the beach. The paramedics flipped her over and tried to revive her, by rote theory, before lifting her onto a gurney. The wheels of the gurney left tiny furrows in the sand, but the tide was coming in, erasing wide crescents. Bell was impressed, but he couldn’t figure out what left him astonished. He envied the woman’s anonymity. Her suspended identity enriched his ballooning awareness: the world was full of nobodies.
He thought of a bar trick he liked to perform for the girls. He could do it all night with just a pack of Salems and a sixty-five-cent Krazy Wand bottle. He takes a calculated drag and exhales smoke into a soap bubble. It drifts into the tables of ladies. It pops. The smoke is released.
When he returned to the house, his mother was in the kitchen stirring a pot, her hand making a figure eight, then tapping, then twisting. The spoon on the enamel rim resonated on the spinal nerves and Bell walked over and took the spoon out of his mother’s hand. She took it back. Divorced from his father for years, she was still upset if she sometimes saw him on the street. She told Bell that she had met his father at one of the rotaries and they had to steer around the circle together for a few moments, jockeying for position. Bell told her to pretend that his father doesn’t exist. She reminded Bell that they lived on an island, after all, and they couldn’t always avoid each other, could they? “Quite a scene on First Beach,” he told her.
“Did we know the girl?” his mother asked him.
“Probably not.”
“You didn’t recognize her?”
“I said no.”
Then he heard his sister, Christine, drive up the oyster shells with her boyfriend, Miller. Christine worked days at Raytheon. She seemed different since his discharge from the Navy. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on. Her face looked both expectant and sullied. As if expectancy itself was what tainted her. Bell didn’t imagine she could have changed too much since high school. She maintained a serious, collegiate aura although she didn’t go on to college. She had a habit of biting her lower lip, organizing her thoughts with her teeth clamped down on the same red swell. In Bell’s absence, she had joined the local Latin League, going to monthly potlucks with some steeped-in-culture oldsters and scholarly kids interested in the Roman lifestyle. She tried to explain to Bell about the Saturnalia. Then, she was a new member of the Newport Community Theater, where she had been asked to star in a one-act play. She showed Bell the flyers advertising the production: “Kristine Bellamy in Riders to the Sea, by Irish playwright J. M. Synge.”
Her name had been spelled incorrectly with a K. Bell approved of the change, telling her he never liked the word Christ in her name. He saw that she carried a spinning wheel back and forth to the rehearsals. The first night he was home, he watched his sister leave the house with the little wooden contraption, a wheel and a spindle. It gave him a start. Yet she was still wearing her David Bowie tour jacket, scuffed leather, scabby at the elbows, a relic of the seventies. The spinning wheel lost its clout against the rock-’n’-roll souvenir, and the contrast pleased Bell.
“This is Miller.” Christine introduced Bell to her new boyfriend. “I met Miller at the Community Theater.”
“I change the colored spots and move the flats back and forth with the kids who don’t get the parts they want. Idle brats,” Miller called them. Miller came often to the house to prompt Christine and help her rehearse her lines for Riders to the Sea. Bell wasn’t pleased to have Miller around when he wanted to settle in with his mother and sister.
Bell told Christine, “I found a drowned girl on the beach.”
“You found her?”
“Actually, I was second in line.” He waited for her reaction. His sister looked at him. She saw he was evaluating her, so she didn’t say anything. His mother went next door to discuss the news with her neighbor, who had signaled to her through the facing kitchen window.
When it was just the three of them, Miller admitted that he wished he had seen the drowned woman. “Nothing like a body in the surf,” Miller said.
“What do you mean, nothing like it? Are you crazy?” Christine asked.
Bell squinted at Miller, trying to see where this was going and he pushed it along. “Miller’s right about that. It’s a seventh wonder.”
“An impressive sight, isn’t it?” Miller asked. “More lyrical than a body on dry land. Like a message in a bottle. There’s a mysterious connection, a romantic spell, like a tryst between the victim and the person who finds her. Who found the woman?”
“A kid.”
Miller said, “Yeah, well, but you were down there. You had a part.”
“I felt that,” Bell said, “like I’m initiated.”
“Exactly! It’s a tingle,” Miller said.
“She was like some dish from Atlantis,” Bell went on, teasing his sister.
Miller discussed local catastrophes, boats going down, a couple of notable shootings, Sunny von Bülow, and the six or seven yearly leaps from bridges.
“Hey, who writes the Crime Report, is it you?” Christine rolled her script into a tight tube and pointed to Miller who had seated himself at the kitchen table.
Miller talked all that time but never looked directly at Bell. He talked about the drowned woman as if he was teaching a class on it. Miller looked too old for Christine. He had stiff ashy hair that formed three or four stalactites across his shoul
ders. He smiled at Christine, showing teeth that were harnessed in clear plastic fencing, some kind of invisible orthodontics to correct an overbite. A progressive decision for a man his age, he told Bell. Miller slouched with his legs extended deep under the kitchen table, a posture, Bell believed, that should be reserved for family members only.
When Miller stretched his arms over his head, Bell glimpsed a peculiar device belted at his waist. It was some kind of hospital gizmo, a tiny box, the size of a pack of Winston Kings. A small display screen shimmered as an emerald dot pulsed to prove the battery pack was A-okay, or to provide some other light-coded information. Bell tried to remember what he knew about modern medical technology. “What is that you’ve got there?”
Christine said, “That’s Miller’s insulin infusion pump. It regulates a steady flow of insulin through a little tube taped to his abdomen.”
The explanation disturbed Bell; he wasn’t alarmed about the man’s problem, but he realized Christine had been privy to this tube inserted in Miller’s belly. Bell saw that this high-tech medical toy might be an attraction for Christine. Her lovers seemed to have chronic maladies, a skin condition or a joint replacement. Then she dated new arrivals, Cuban boys and Cape Verdeans with English as a second language; there was always some obstacle she enjoyed tackling.
Her current squeeze: a diabetic stage technician. For someone suffering a condition, Miller appeared self-assured and arrogant. Thin and sallow, he looked utterly confident in his underweight condition. His smile, reinforced with plastic brackets, had a sinister depth. He had Christine up against the GE, kissing her, the buzz of the freon increasing. Bell took the keys to the car and looked back once, hoping his sister had disentangled, but she wasn’t rushing for his sake.
He drove his mother’s car the full perimeter of the island. He went up West Main Road, watching the late sun touch long ribbons on the bay, wakes from tankers and little frothy bows behind pleasure boats. He came back on East Main, seeking blue splints of the Sakonnet all the way down. He drove out Ocean Drive, where breakers crashed against the jetties in bright crescents, glassy as chandeliers. He loved the spectacle of the sea, the ornament of its lighted spray against notches of granite. After seeing something like that, he sought the smeary ambience of a tavern. It was the tiled bar at the Narragansett, black and white inches of cracked ceramics like a littered shoreline and stale spills puddled around the table legs.
“They’re all gone now, and there isn’t anything more the sea can do to me.” Christine was just coming in the door, home from Raytheon. She was in character, the keening voice of an Irish matron whose sons have all been drowned. Her authority always surprised Bell. She took the spinning wheel from the closet and went into the living room. Bell watched as she placed it on the floor and the wheel revolved slowly. It was like something he might see at the helm of a small ketch. She wanted to rehearse while spinning a snag of yarn and she asked him if he would read the lines and cue her.
“This play is in Irish?” he asked her.
She told him, “Don’t be stupid, of course it’s English, but it lilts. I’ll show you.” She recited a phrase, an insistent querying dirge. “Everything sounds like a question,” she told him. “The words go up at the end, the sentences just keep ascending like climbing switchbacks.”
“No kidding?” he said.
“There’s someone-in after crying out by the seashor-ir,” she recited. The words were echoey, lifting at the final syllables.
“Okay,” he said.
“He’s gone now, and when the black night is falling I’ll have no son left me in the whar-ald,” her voice climbed and faltered, climbed again.
Bell read from the script like a mechanic running his eyes over a parts-and-service ledger in the metric system, rubbing his chin with the back of his wrist. Christine enjoyed his shyness and she let him founder.
“Riders to the Sea is supposed to be a tragic play,” she told him. She wanted to share the winey taste of the lines, and she told him the words should feel exciting on the tongue, like capers or wild mushrooms.
He asked her, “Why are they doing this one? Why not the usual West Side Story? What about Hair?”
“This is a real play,” she told him. “You know, there are just two themes in life. No musical soundtracks necessary.”
“What themes?”
“Love and death.”
“When did you decide this?” he asked her.
“We’re all born with the secret,” she told him.
Christine wasn’t just teasing. Her remark emerged whisper-smooth, the way a U-2 submarine rises all glossy and serene in the middle of a giant swell.
“Real drama,” she told him, “is pain kept brewing all the weeks before the curtain goes up, so that no one can misinterpret pain as performance. It’s supposed to be pain alive.”
He wanted to get out of the house. Christine was tilting something. She looked pale and eerie, but maybe this was from working deep in the windowless complex at Raytheon.
He cued her lines. It was a depressing story. All the men drown and the women are left weeping before a rough-hewn coffin. “This is a little hard to swallow,” he told her.
He told her that he was happy she was just practicing for a performance when sooner or later it gets dark on its own. “Don’t ask me what I saw in jail. Not just the crowd on the inside, I’m talking about the families who come to visit. Talk about the sad truth.”
Christine nodded, she was trying to picture the unhappy relations queuing up outside the prison doors. “I would have visited you, Bell, if it wasn’t Virginia. Didn’t I come to see you all the time at the Training School?”
“I’m not complaining,” he told her. He was wondering. Maybe acting in a tragic one-act play can make a girl responsible and wary. “This Miller dude,” Bell told her, “what’s the story with him?”
Christine turned her face to the window to secrete her grin. The beach light touched her profile as it reached into the house, splicing through glass curtain pulls and lifting the grain on the woodwork. Bell saw that Christine was pleased he worried about her; or, perhaps she was pleased, simply, to think of Miller.
She began again. This time her voice was too high, the singsong of leprechauns. She halted mid-sentence and started over. Finding the right pitch, she recited a long passage and tried her best to keen at an appropriate octave, with the complexity of a vibrating cello string, the way her director had explained it should sound.
He was in the first booth at the Narragansett Tavern. He liked to watch the door sweep open and ratchet slowly back. He glimpsed the harbor outside, a dense stand of masts like a glaring aluminum atrium. The girl from the CVS drugstore was rolling a ballpoint over the curve of his knee, inking a burning dot on the stiff denim of his linedried jeans. The other week, he had found her sorting the magazines in the front of the store. Stacking the older issues on a trolley. He asked her what she did with the old issues. Do they get recycled? He took a heavy issue of Computer Shopper out of her hands, thick as a phone book. She didn’t say anything as the weight was transferred. She looked back in a steady, instinctive perusal of his face the way a bird and its worm exchange a moment of awakening.
“We send them back on the truck,” she said after a while. She looked pretty young. But youth is a pie with many slices. She told Bell, “I can punch out for an hour at about seven-thirty. Come get me if you want. Or do you just want one of these periodicals?”
“I’ll be back,” he had told her. He was smiling. He liked the way she had said “periodicals,” as if she were some kind of librarian. No names were exchanged. He didn’t tell her his name was Bellamy, Bell for short, and she seemed just as happy to stand, unidentified, in the center aisle, surrounded by waist-high stacks of glossies.
She finished writing her telephone number along his inside seam and he told her, “You could have spared my mother the annoyance. Besides, I have a photographic memory.”
“Really? Well, what’s my numbe
r, then?” she said. She flattened her palm against his eyes.
He recited the telephone number.
“God, that’s scary,” she said. She didn’t look scared.
“Lucky try,” Bell said. It was easy to please this girl. He didn’t have to encourage her. She sat next to him, pushing her cuticles back as if her fingertips were a key to everything. She wasn’t like Christine, who might get bored without conversation. Christine might demand to play cards or challenge him to match historical data with highlights from the last three decades of rock-’n’-roll. Christine had said, laughing, “Rock stars are noble primitives. They have their roots in ancient culture, like the Saturnalia.”
When he was in the company of a thriving slut like the CVS girl, why was he thinking about his sister, trying to nestle her image against the drugstore clerk? The CVS girl already failed to intrigue him beyond his first inspiration, which was never a thrill for long. He might go with the CVS girl again. For a couple of hours, park on a side street near the Cliff Walk. Relief, without an immediate rekindling of tension, is often a disappointment.
Never calling it forth, still he saw the dark fleck on the drowned woman’s thigh. Its tiny circumference seemed to recur in his vision like a vitreous floater or a snag in the retina. He faced his companion. She wet her lips and waited. He spoke and her eyes squeezed shut in tight winces of approval. She agreed. It didn’t matter what he was saying.