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‘Scott, sweetie,’ she says instead, with commendable evenness. ‘What are you doing?’
The man is starting to relax, a little. Their son's whereabouts are now known, after all. Even if he fell, he can swim. But other parts of the man's soul, held closer to his core, are twisted up and clamping tighter with each second that passes. Why is Scott not responding? Why is he just standing there?
The low panic the man feels has little to do with questions even such as these, however. It is merely present, in his guts, as if that soft breeze followed him down off the deck and through the woods, and has now grabbed his stomach like a fist, squeezing harder and harder. He thinks he can smell something now, too, as if a bubble of gas has come up to the surface of the water, releasing something dark and rich and sweet. He takes another step down the jetty.
‘Scott,’ he says, firmly. ‘It's okay if you want to look in the lake. But take a step back, yeah?’
The man is relieved when his son does just that.
The boy takes a pace backward, and finally turns. He does this in several small steps, as if confused to find himself where he is, and taking ostensive care.
There is something wrong with the boy's face.
It takes his father a moment to realize that it's not physical, rather that the expression on it is one he has never seen there before. A kind of confusion, of utter dislocation. ‘Scott – what's wrong?’
The boy's face clears, and he looks up at his father.
‘Daddy?’ he says, as if very surprised. ‘Why…’
‘Yes, of course, it's Daddy,’ the man says. He starts to walk slowly toward Scott, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, though the temperature around the lake seems to have jumped twenty degrees. ‘Look, I don't know what—’
But then the boy's mouth slowly opens, as he stares past or through his father, back toward the end of the jetty, at the woods. The look is so direct that his mother turns to glance back that way too, not knowing what to expect.
‘No,’ the boy says. ‘No.’
The first time he says it quietly. The second time is far louder. His expression changes again, too, in a way both parents will remember for the rest of their lives, turning in a moment from a face they know better than their own to a mask of dismay and heartbreak that is horrifying to see on a child.
‘What's …’
And then he shouts. ‘Run, Daddy. Run!’
The man starts to run toward him. He can hear his wife running too. But the boy topples sideways before they can get to him, falling awkwardly over the deck and flipping with slow grace down into the water.
The man is on the jetty in the last of the afternoon light. He stands with his child in his arms.
The police are there. A young one, and an older one, soon followed by many more. Four hours later the coroner will tell the police, and then the parents, that it was not the fall into the water, nor to the deck, nor even anything before that, that did it.
The boy just died.
Part 1 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)
It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion.
Richard Brautigan
An Unfortunate Woman
Chapter 1 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)
Ted came and found me a little after seven. I was behind the bar, assisting with a backlog of beer orders for the patrons out on deck while they waited to be seated. The Pelican's seasonal drinks station is tiny, an area in front of an opening in the wall through to the outside, and Mazy and I were moving around it with the grace of two old farts trying to reverse mobile homes into the same parking space. There's barely room for one, let alone two, but though Mazy is cute and cool and has as many piercings and tattoos as any young person could wish for, she's a little slow when it comes to grinding out margaritas and cold Budweisers and Diet Cokes, extra ice, no lime. I don't know what it is about the ocean, and sand, but it makes people want margaritas. Even in Oregon, in September.
‘Can't get hold of the little asshole,’ Ted muttered. His face was red and hot, and thinning grey hair was sticking to his pate, though the air conditioning was working just fine. ‘You mind?’
‘No problem,’ I said.
I finished the order I was on and then headed through the main area of the restaurant, where old John Prine songs played quietly in the background and the ocean looked grey and cool through the big windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.
The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy, however, and I'd been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.
The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sitting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-fired oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fish. His wife thought he'd got it wrong but she believed that about everything he did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn't prepared to take it as the final word. Ted is a decent guy but how he's managed to stay afloat in the restaurant business for so long is a mystery. A rambling shack overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out to the sea – and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it takes its name – the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively as to become one of those places you go back to because you went there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young or, well, just because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.
I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place to do so. It wasn't my place to make the damned things, either, but over the last five months I'd sometimes wound up covering the station when Kyle, the official thin-base supremo, didn't make it in for the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the owner's youngest daughter (of five), a girl who went to a barely accredited college down in California to learn some strain of Human Resources bullshit but dropped out so fast that she bounced. She wound up back home not doing much except partying and smoking dope on the beach with a boyfriend who made pizza badly – the actual dough being forged by one of the back-room Ecuadorians in the morning – and couldn't even get his shit together to do that six nights a week. This drove Ted so insane that he couldn't even think about it (much less address the problem practically), and so Kyle was basically a fixture, regardless of how searching his exploration of the outer limits of being a pointless good-looking prick.
If he hadn't shown up by the time someone wanted pizza then I'd do the dough-spinning on his behalf, the other wait staff picking up the slack on the floor. I didn't mind. I'd found that I enjoyed smoothing the tomato sauce in meditative circles, judiciously adding mozzarella and basil and chunks of pepperoni or crayfish or pesto chicken, then hefting the peel to slide them toward the wood fire. I didn't emulate Kyle's policy of adding other ingredients at random – allegedly a form of ‘art’ (which he'd studied for about a week, at a place where they'll accept dogs if they bring the tuition fees), more likely a legacy of being stoned 24/7 – but stuck to the toppings as described, and so the response from the tables tended to be positive. My pizzas were more circular than Kyle's too, but that wasn't the point either. He was Kyle, the pizza guy. I was John, the waiter guy.
Not even the waiter, in fact, just a waiter, amongst several. Indefinite article man.
And that's alright by me.
Wonderboy finally rolled up an hour later, delivered in an open-top car that fishtailed around the lot and then disappeared again in a cloud of dust. He went to the locker room to change, and came out twitching.
‘Glad you could make it,’ I said, taking off the special pizza apron. I didn't care one way or the other about Kyle being late. I was merely following form. You don't let fellow toilers at the bottom of the food-production chain get away with any shit, or they'll be doing it all the time.
‘Yeah, well,’ he said, confused. ‘You know, like, it's my job.’
I didn't have an answer to that, so stepped out of his way and went back to waiting tables. I established what people wanted, and pushed the specials. I conveyed orders back to the kitchen, instigating the production of breaded shrimp and grilled swordfish and blackened mahi mahi, and the celebrated side salad with honey apple vinaigrette. I brought the results back to the table, along with drinks and bonhomie. I returned twice to check that everything was okay, and refresh their iced water. I accepted payment via cash, cheque, or credit card, and reciprocated with little mints and a postcard of the restaurant. I told people it had been great seeing them, and to drive safe, and wiped the table down in preparation for the next family or young couple or trio of wizened oldsters celebrating sixty years of mutual dislike.
After two cycles of this, the evening ended and we cleared the place up, and everyone started for home.
It was dark by then. Unusually humid too, the air like the breath of a big, hot dog who'd been drinking sea water all afternoon. I nodded goodbye as rusty cars piloted by other staff crunkled past me, on the way up the pebbled slip road from the Pelican's location, to turn left or right along Highway 101.
The cooks left jammed together into one low-slung and battered station wagon, the driver giving me a pro-forma eye-fuck as he passed. I assumed they all boarded together in some house up in Astoria or Seaside, saving money to send back home, but as I'd never spoken to any of them, I didn't actually know.
As I reached the highway I realized Kyle was a few yards behind me. I glanced back, surprised.
‘You walking somewhere?’
‘Yeah, right,’ he smirked. ‘Mission control's on the way. Big party up the road tonight. We're headed in your direction, if you want a ride.’
I hesitated. Normally I walked the two miles north. The other staff know this, and think I'm out of my mind. I look at their young, hopeful faces and consider asking what else I should be doing with the time, but I don't want to freak them out. I don't want to think of myself as not-young, either, but as a thirty-five year old amongst humans with training wheels, you can feel like the go-to guy for insider information on the formation of the tectonic plates.
The walk is pleasant enough. You head along the verge, the road on your right, the other side of which is twenty feet of scrubby grass and then rocky outcrops. On your left you pass the parking lots of very small, retro-style condos and resorts, three storey at most and rendered in pastel or white with accents in a variety of blues, called things like The Sandpiper and Waves and Trade Winds; or fifty-yard lots stretching to individual beach houses; or, for long stretches, just undergrowth and dunes.
But tonight my feet were tired and I wanted to be home, plus there's a difference between doing your own thing and merely looking unfriendly and perverse.
‘That'd be great,’ I said.
Chapter 2 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)
Within thirty seconds we realized we had squat to say to each other outside the confines of the restaurant, and Kyle reached in his T-shirt pocket and pulled out a joint. He lit it, hesitated, then offered it to me. To be sociable, I took a hit. Pretty much immediately I could tell why his pizzas were so dreadful: if this was his standard toke, it was amazing the guy could even stand up. We hung in silence for ten minutes, passing the joint back and forth, waiting for inspiration to strike. Before long I was beginning to wish I'd walked. At least that way I could have headed over the dunes down to the beach, where the waves would have cut the humidity a little.
‘Gonna rain,’ Kyle said suddenly, as if someone had given him a prompt via an earpiece.
I nodded. ‘I'm thinking so.’
Five minutes later, thankfully, Becki's car came down the road as if hurled by a belligerent god. It decelerated within a shorter distance than I would have thought possible, though not without cost to the tyres.
‘Hey,’ she said, around a cigarette. ‘Walking Dude's going to accept a ride? Well. I'm honoured.’
I smiled. ‘Been a long day.’
‘Word, my liege. Hop in.’
I got in back and held on tight as she returned the vehicle to warp speed. Kyle seemed to know better than to try to talk to his woman while she was in charge of heavy machinery, and I followed his lead, enjoying the wind despite the significant G-forces that came with it.
The journey didn't take long at all. When we were a hundred yards from my destination, I tapped Becki on the shoulder. She wrenched her entire upper body around to see what I wanted.
‘What?’
‘Now,’ I shouted, ‘would be a good time to start slowing down.’
‘Gotcha.’
She wrestled the car to a halt and I vaulted out over the side. The radio was on before I had both feet on the ground. Becki waved with a backward flip of the hand, and then the car was hell and gone down the road.
This coast is very quiet at night. Once in a while a pickup will roar past, trailing music or a meaningless bellow or ejecting an empty beer can to bounce clattering down the road. But mostly it's only the rustle of the surf on the other side of the dunes, and by the time I get home, when I've walked, the evening in the restaurant feels like it might have happened yesterday, or the week before, or to someone else. Everything settles into one long chain of events with little to connect the days except the fact that that's what they do.
Finally I turned and walked up to the house. One of the older vacation homes along this stretch, it has wide, overgrown lots either side and consists of two interlocked wooden octagons, which must have seemed like a good idea to someone at some point – I'm guessing around 1973. In fact it just means there are more angles than usual for rain and sea air to work at – but it's got a good view and a walkway over the dunes down to the sand, and it costs me nothing. Not long after I came here I met a guy called Gary, in Ocean's, a bar half a mile down the road from the Pelican. He'd just gotten unmarried and was in Oregon trying to get his head together. One look told you he was becalmed on the internal sea of the recently divorced: distracted, only occasionally glancing at you directly enough to reveal the wild gaze of a captain alone on a lost ship, tied to the wheel and trying to stop its relentless spinning. Sometimes these men and women will lose control and you'll find them in bars drinking too loud and fast and with nothing like real merriment in their eyes; but mostly they simply hold on, bodies braced against the wind, gazing with a thousand-yard stare into what they assume must be their future.
It's a look I recognized. We bonded, bought each other beers, met up a few times before he shipped back east. Long and short of it is that I ended up being a kind of caretaker for his place, though it doesn't really need it. I stay there, leaving a light on once in a while and being seen in the yard, which presumably lessens the chances of some asshole breaking in. I patch the occasional leak in the roof, and am supposed to call Gary if the smaller octagon (which holds the two bedrooms) starts to sag any worse over the concrete pilings that hold it up on the dune. In heavy winds it's disconcertingly like being on an actual ship, but it'll hold for now. In theory I have to move out if he decides to come out to stay, but in two years that's never happened. I last spoke to him three months ago to get his okay on replacing a screen door, and he was living with a new woman back in Boston and sounded cautiously content. I guess the beach house is a part of Gary's past he's not ready to divest, an investment in a future some part of his heart has not yet quite written off. It'll happen, sooner or later, and then I guess I'll live somewhere else.
Once inside, I opened the big sliding windows and went out on the deck, belatedly realizing it was a Friday night. I'd known this before, of course, sort of. The restaurant's always livelier, regardless of the season – but Friday-is-busy is different to hey-it's-Friday! Or it used to be. Perhaps it was this that made me grab a couple of beers from the fridge; could also have been the half-joint floating around my system, coupled with a feeling of restlessness I'd had all day; or merely that I was home a little earlier than usual and Becki and Kyle had, without trying, made me feel about a million years old.
I decided I'd take the beers down onto the beach. A one-man Friday night, watching the waves, listening to the music of the spheres. Party on.
I walked to within a few yards of the sea and sat down on the sand. Looked up along the coast for a while, at the distant glow of windows in the darkness, listening to the sound of the waves coming up, and going back, as the sky grew lower and matt with gathering cloud.
I methodically drank my way through the first beer and felt calm, and empty, though not really at peace. To achieve that I would have needed to believe that I had a place in the world, instead of standing quietly to one side. I'd been in Oregon for nearly three years. Floating. Before the Pelican had been bar work up and down the coast, some odd jobs, plus periods working the door at nightclubs over in Portland. Service industry roustabout work, occupations that required little but the willingness to work cheaply, at night, and to risk occasional confrontations with one's fellow man. My possessions were limited to a few clothes, a laptop, and some books. I didn't even own a car any more, though I did have money in the bank. More than my co-workers would have imagined, I'm sure, but that's because all they know about me is I can hold my own in a busy service and produce approximately circular Italian food.
Finally it rained.
Irrevocably, and very hard, soaking me so quickly that there was no hurry to go inside. I sat out a little longer, as the rain bounced off the waves and pocked the sand. Eventually I finished the second beer and then stood up and started for home.
As Friday nights go, I couldn't claim this one had really caught fire.
Back inside I dried off and wandered into the living room. It was nearly two o'clock, but I couldn't seem to find my way to bed. I played on the web for a little while, the last refuge of the restless and clinically bored. As a last resort I checked my email – another of the existentially empty moments the Internet hands you on a plate.
Hey world, want to talk?
No? Well, maybe later.
Invitations to invest in Chinese industry, buy knock-off watches and stock up on Viagra. Some Barely Legal Teen Cuties had been in touch again, too. As was their custom, they were keen to spill the beans on how they'd got it on with their roommate or boss or a herd of broad-minded elk.
I declined the offers, also as usual, hoping they wouldn't be offended after the trouble they'd gone to for me, and me alone. I'd selected all the crap as a block and was about to throw it in the trash when a message near the bottom caught my eye.
The subject line said: PLEASE, PLEASE READ
Most likely more spam, of course. One of the Nigerian classics, perhaps, the wife/son/cat of a recently deceased oligarch who'd squirrelled away millions that some lucky randomer could have twenty per cent of, if they'd just send all their bank details to a stranger who'd spelt his own name three different ways in a single email.
If so, however, they'd titled it well. That combination of words is hard to ignore. I clicked on it, yawning, trying and failing to remember the last time I'd received a message from someone in particular. The email was short.
I know what happened
Nothing else. Not even a period at the end of the sentence. The name of the apparent sender of the email – Ellen Robertson – was not that of anyone I knew.
Just a piece of spam after all.
I hit delete and went to bed.
Chapter 3 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)
Next morning started with a walk up the beach, carrying a big cup of coffee. I've done that every day since I've been living in Gary's house. Far as I'm concerned, if the beach is right there and you don't kick off the day by walking along it, then you should move the hell inland and make way for someone who understands what the coast is for.
I was up early, and the sands were even more deserted than usual. I passed a couple of guys optimistically waving fishing rods at the sea, and a few people like me. Lone men and women in shorts and loose shirts, tracing their ritual walkways, smiling briefly at strangers. Sometimes when the sun is bright and the world holds no shadows at all I imagine what it would be like to have a smaller set of footprints keeping pace with mine. But not often, and not that morning.
I walked further than usual, but it was still only eight-thirty when I got back to the house. There was already a message on the machine. It was from Ted.
‘Christ,’ he'd said, without preamble. ‘Look, I hate to call you like this. But could you come lend a hand? Someone's broken in. To the restaurant.’
His voice went muffled for a few moments, as he spoke brusquely to someone in the background.
Then he came back on, sounding even more pissed. ‘Look, maybe you're out for the day already, but if not—’
I picked up the handset and called him back.
Rather than wait for me to walk, Ted came down, arriving outside the house ten minutes later. It's always been evident where Becki acquired her driving style. Ted turned the pickup around in the road without any notable decrease in speed, and drew level with me. I was leaning against the post at the top of my drive, waiting, having a cigarette. I leaned down to talk through the open passenger window.
‘You need me to bring any tools?’
He shook his head. ‘Got a bunch in the storeroom. Going to have to go buy glass and wood, but I'll get on to that later. Fucking day this is gonna be.’
I climbed into the truck and just about got the door shut before he dropped his foot on the pedal.
‘When did you find it?’
Ted's face was even redder and more baggy-eyed than usual. ‘One of the cooks. Raul, I think. Got there at seven with the rest of the crew, called me right away.’
‘Which one's Raul?’
