Текст книги "Beach Strip"

Автор книги: John Lawrence Reynolds

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Air conditioning changed the beach strip, and perhaps the morals of the wealthy men who deposited their families here for the summer, but that’s a doubtful notion. As the factories grew larger and dirtier, their smoke and dust were carried on the west wind down the shore of the bay to the strip of sand separating it from the lake. In time, the soot and smells became unbearable for wealthy families with cottages on the strip. Luckily for them, air conditioning arrived just as the soot began turning the strip as black as the rest of the city. With air conditioning installed in their mansions, located upwind from the factories and mills, no one needed twenty-four-room Victorian cottages on the beach strip and the cooling breezes from the lake to get a good night’s sleep in summer. Many of the massive summer homes were first converted to rooming houses, then demolished and replaced by spindly three-room frame cottages with screened porches, and these became the belated palaces of factory workers who rented them for a week or two each summer in the years after the wealthy families abandoned the beach strip. The men would sit on their porch and listen to insects buzz against the screens while their children played in the sand and their wives prepared summer salads and lemonade in the kitchen. The men sat like that, their backs to the factories, for two weeks each year, living fourteen days each summer in the manner they wished to live every day of their lives.

I huddled in the living-room chair thinking of the wealthy families who once lived here on the most desirable side of the strip, facing the lake. I was thinking of the wives, and what they thought of their husbands back in the city. I decided they thought very little of them, intent as they were on operating a household free of the interference of men.

I have never been free of the interference of men, and I would not be for some time.

That is what I thought after the red glow in the sky faded and I heard police officers speaking in low voices outside my window, talking about what had occurred that evening among the shrubs, about the naked cop who had shot himself on a blanket beneath the moon.

5.

I slept in the living-room chair and awoke remembering. remembered hearing the sound of the transport trucks on the high bridges behind me as I was falling asleep. I remembered thinking of the men who drove them, and how strange it must be to be constantly moving, without a choice of destination. I remembered what woke me up.

It was our telephone in the kitchen, where telephones belong. Not in cars or purses or pockets or attached to your ear like jewellery. Telephones should be in the kitchen, where lives are lived, and I followed its sound. I had refused to get a cell phone, but I gave in to Gabe’s idea of getting a cordless phone that we could use in the garden, if we chose, although why anybody would want to use a telephone in the garden was beyond me. I called people in the kitchen, and I answered the phone there. Am I stubborn? Do I cling to old ways? Does a shark have teeth?

The kitchen was bright with light from the sun, already high above the lake and shining through the windows facing the water.

It was Mel calling, as I knew it would be. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Yes. In a chair in the living room.”

“I’m going back downtown. I was there until past two.”

I said nothing. I didn’t care where or how long or with whom he had slept.

“There’ll be an inquest. It’s all over the news. People from the newspapers, the TV stations, will want to talk to you.”

I heard voices on the boardwalk along the beach. When I pushed the curtain aside, I saw two television trucks in the lane next to our house, and a woman pointing a microphone like a weapon. I closed the curtain. “They’re here,” I said.

“You don’t have to talk to them.”

“I know.” Someone had seen me and was ringing the doorbell. “I won’t.” Now there was rapping at the back door. I squinted at the clock. Twenty minutes to eight in the morning. How did the woman with the microphone get her hair and her makeup so perfect this early in the day? It was obscene. She didn’t even need it—she was maybe twenty-five years old. Women like me, we need … I began to cry.

“Josie?”

“I’m here.” I thought I would never eat again, and that I would never cease crying.

“Refer them to Reg Gilmour. He handles media downtown. That’s all you have to tell them. They can talk to him at … you got a pen there?”

I opened the kitchen drawer, the one next to the drawer where Gabe kept the ammunition for his gun when he was home, pulled out a pencil, and looked for the notebook we always kept on the counter, the wire-bound book he had torn a page from and written I’m in the bushes. Get naked! It wasn’t there. Gabe and I wrote shopping lists and telephone numbers and messages to each other in the notebook. I had bought it at a drugstore. We could have used one of the police-issue pads, like others did, Gabe bringing home a couple at a time, but Gabe said no, that’s not what they were for. Using them for our personal use would be theft. So we paid two bucks for the same damn pad from a drugstore. That’s how honest Gabe was. That’s what my husband was like.

When I couldn’t find the pad on the counter, all the anger, guilt, and frustration from the evening before welled up in me again. I opened all the drawers, then turned to look on the kitchen table and in the cupboards where the dishes were kept, all the places I knew the pad would never be. I began shaking with rage and anxiety and something else. “I can’t find it,” I said to Mel. “I can’t find it, it’s not here.”

Mel asked what I was talking about, but I couldn’t say. I just hung up the telephone, walked to the rear door, and screamed, “Go to hell!” at everyone—the television reporter with the perfect hair and makeup, two guys with TV cameras, a photographer who took my picture over and over. Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach who were still building their oversized house to resemble a castle, complete with parapets, were walking their dog, and both they and the schnauzer stopped to look. They all saw the grieving widow at her worst.

I returned to the chair in the living room, where I curled into a ball and thought about Gabe, and how he wouldn’t even steal a two-dollar wire-bound pad from the police department, and fell asleep there.

I DID NOT DREAM FOR THE NEXT TWO HOURS. I woke to the ringing telephone, to people knocking on my door, to the sound of cars arriving and leaving in the lane next to the house. Each time the noise ceased, I slept again. No dreams. No organizing of thoughts. No dealing with facts I did not understand, like why my husband would carry a gun with him to a blanket in the bushes and wait for me there and, when I did not arrive, why he would shoot himself in the head.

Around ten, I walked to the bathroom and showered and combed my hair and put on some lipstick and cried a little more. I dressed, made coffee, and listened to my telephone messages. Two were from Mel. He was concerned, he was sorry, and he honestly wanted to do whatever he could for me. I believed him. In everything we had done, as wrong as it might have been, Mel had been gentle with me, and concerned about Gabe. Men can do that—sleep with another man’s wife and worry about the couple’s marriage. Mel had worried about Gabe. Had Mel been married, I would not have given a damn about his wife. Why should I? That’s a man’s job.

Three neighbours and an old friend, Dewey Maas, had called to say they had heard the news about Gabe and to express their sadness. Helen Detwiler from the retirement home passed along her condolences and told me not to worry about work because they would make other arrangements for as long as it took me to get over my loss, and that I might consider calling Mother as soon as I was able. Two radio stations and a local newspaper reporter wanted to talk to me.

I phoned Helen, was told she was in a staff meeting, and asked that she assure Mother that I was all right and I would visit her later in the day. Then I drank three cups of coffee and considered drinking a glass of whisky, just to gather nerve to call my sister, Tina.

NEITHER MY SISTER NOR I HAVE CHILDREN. Some people see this as a tragedy. I see it as evidence of genetic selection.

I was unable to have children, although I was informed that my problem, if that’s what you wish to call it, could be cured with a combination of drugs, surgery and petri dishes. When my first husband and I learned we could not be parents, everyone we knew suggested adoption. I replied that adopting a child was like buying a used car through the mail. The truth is, we weren’t devastated by the news, although my first husband, in one of our last fights before our divorce, accused me of lying about being unhappy that I could not bear his child. By that time he was at least half correct.

Tina, on the other hand, is almost abnormally fecund, which is a word that looks and sounds uglier than it should. The way Tina explained it, she could get knocked up by folding a man’s underwear. Tina got pregnant twice, with two consecutive boyfriends, before she was eighteen. She claimed she’d had sex with each of them only once. She aborted both, and the second time was so painful she decided never to go through childbirth. And she didn’t.

I sat with my hand on the telephone, knowing it was early in British Columbia and thinking perhaps I should wait until she was fully awake before calling her. As if she would hesitate to call me, I realized, and dialed her number.

She was awake, probably having made eggs Benedict for the neighbourhood after leading them in an hour of yoga. Tina lives in Kitsilano, a part of Vancouver that tries to pretend it’s Beverly Hills, just as Vancouver wishes it were Los Angeles. She lives there with her husband, a surgeon who inherited a reasonably sizable fortune from his father’s lumber investments. Andrew, Tina’s husband, had enough cash on hand to buy the southern half of Vancouver Island and dine on pheasant every day without lifting a finger, if he chose to. Instead, he married Tina, purchased a small mansion in Kitsilano, and spends his days cutting people open and examining their innards, and I have no idea why.

When I visited Tina and Andrew before marrying Gabe, Tina introduced me to her country club friends. They were so gracious and warm that by the third day I feared I would throw up on the next woman who gave me an air kiss before handing me a glass of Chardonnay. On the fourth day, I flagged a cab near the university and had the driver take me to East Hastings Street, the skid row of Vancouver. I sat in the cab, parked at the curb, for twenty minutes while I watched hookers stumble into alleyways to give twenty-dollar quickies, and guys with vomit on their sweatshirts wash windshields at stoplights, and druggies pick up their fixes, and people in tourist buses stare open-mouthed at the carnival freak show. Then I had the driver take me back to Kitsilano for canapés and pretension. The few minutes on the other side of town set me up for the rest of the week. Everything, my father used to say, needs to be rebalanced from time to time. My father was rarely wrong about anything.

Now, at the sound of my sister’s voice on the telephone, something terrible happened to me: I became my mother, unable to speak.

She said “Hello?” three or four times, growing angrier with each delivery, until I finally got the words past the lump in my throat. “It’s me,” I said.

“Who’s me?” Tina said. Then: “Josephine Olivia? Josephine?”

Some people hate their names. I don’t hate mine. I just think Josephine Olivia is perfect for somebody else. Anybody else. By the time I reached puberty, I insisted that everyone call me Josie. Not Josephine. Not ever. Tina would tease me about it, calling me Josephine and then saying “Oops!” as though she’d forgotten how much I disliked it. She said “Oops!” so often she began calling me Josephine Oops until I poured a can of turpentine in her underwear drawer and told her why. Her full name, by the way, is Christina Abigail. The second time I called her Abigail, she hit me on the head with a book.

“Gabe’s dead,” I managed to get out.

“Oh my god. How? At work?”

“Outside our house. On the beach last night. They say …” I swallowed the lump. “They say he shot himself.”

“Oh my god.” Tina is not much on originality about anything, including her expressions of surprise. “Are you okay?”

“Well …” I didn’t have an answer for that.

“Oh my god. I’m coming down.”

“That’s not necessary, Tina—”

“I’m catching a plane this morning. I’ll call you from the airport. Oh my god. What are the funeral arrangements?”

“The what?”

She was losing her patience. I was supposed to be the cooperative victim, I guess. “The arrangements. Who’s taking care of them? When’ll he be buried?”

“I have no idea.”

“That’s what I figured. I’ll be there tonight. Don’t bother coming to the airport to pick me up.” The thought had never entered my mind. “I’ll take a limo. We’ll stay up and talk all night if we have to. Gabe’s killed himself. Oh my god. Love you.”

“Me too,” I said. And she was gone.

I slumped back in the chair. My husband was shot to death practically in our own backyard, and my sister was coming to stay with me, maybe for a week. How much punishment could one woman take?

6.

One of my neighbours has a helicopter on his front porch. It has sat there for more than a year. Not the whole helicopter, just the part you ride in that looks like a large white plastic egg on skis. The rest of it, the blades that spin on top and the long tail with the small propeller on the back, are missing, but Gabe assured me it’s a real helicopter. We would pass the house with the helicopter on the porch during our walks along Beach Boulevard on summer nights, when we wanted to avoid the boardwalk crowded with skaters and skateboarders and bicyclists and joggers and retired people and vagrant hoodlums. We would stroll past the few remaining Victorian-era cottages and the tar-paper shacks and the new prefab homes with goldfish ponds in the front yard and hot tubs in the back, and we would be happy doing it.

The neighbour with the helicopter on his porch also keeps a Florida swamp buggy in the lane next to the house, in front of an army machine that Gabe said looks like an APC, which he translated as Armoured Personnel Carrier. I don’t know what the man who keeps this stuff looks like, because I have never seen him.

The beach strip is peppered with misfits and eccentrics living among young professionals winding themselves up and retired people winding their lives down. They start out in Porsches and end up in golf carts.

If misfits and nonconformists can be catalogued, I do not know any faction that is not represented among our neighbours.

Hans and Trudy, the German couple down the beach with the schnauzer, have been building their stone castle since Gabe and I moved here. Along with the rooftop parapets, it includes narrow windows set deeply into the walls—the better for archers to aim their arrows, I guess—and a heavy oak door studded with rivets. I expected to see gnomes in lederhosen at work on a moat someday. Most of the neighbours think it’s quaint. Nobody considers it out of place.

A motorcycle club converted a cottage at the south end of the beach, the scuzzy end, into a clubhouse, adding steel bars to the windows and drawing weekly visits from the police. Near them, over the dusty upholstery shop, lives a woman who for the past month had been stalking the boardwalk and glaring into our garden, her mouth moving without any words emerging.

Compared with the people, the homes on the beach strip are almost conventional. Some are abandoned, others nearly so. It is a community, as the sociologists say, in transition. A few custom homes are being built among the decaying cottages. The new homes feature cedar shake shingles, bay windows, and something called a great room, which is what you get when you don’t put a ceiling on the living room. They sit among the cheap frame cottages and the trailer park and the retirement homes. There are many distractions on the beach strip. There is little boredom.

AFTER SPEAKING TO TINA, I looked out the kitchen window and into my garden, where two police officers were standing near the gate. The news reporters had moved on to some other disaster, I assumed. The air was already warm and heavy. It was going to be one of those August days they invented air conditioning for.

I opened my door and almost tripped over two jars of marmalade and a plastic-wrapped loaf of banana bread with a note taped to it. Call us if you need to, the note said. It was from Maude Blair, of course. There are many people like the Blairs living on the beach strip. They keep no helicopters on their front porch or bars on their windows. They always nod and smile, and they do not gossip. They care for you, but they find no need to tell you about it except when necessary.

I set the bread and marmalade in the kitchen and returned to look out at the garden shed. The door was closed, but I could see the hook dangling free. “Somebody’s been in our garden shed,” I said to Gabe the first time I found the hook unlatched earlier in the summer. “We should start locking the door.”

“What’s to steal?” he said. “If we’re lucky they’ll take the old lawn mower, maybe the rusty rake and the bag of topsoil.”

“You’ll do anything to get out of gardening,” I muttered.

The shed door was normally held closed with a simple hook and eye. “How much will a padlock cost?” I asked when I found the door open again a day or two later. “Three dollars? Five dollars?”

Gabe said if we hung a padlock on the door we would have to keep the key somewhere, and he was always losing keys.

“Get one with a combination,” I suggested.

Gabe said we would forget the combination and never be able to get back in. So the garden shed remained unlocked. Someone had been in there last night. It might have been a police officer. Or one of the reporters. Or someone could have been hiding in the garden shed when Gabe came out the garden door wrapped in the blanket and carrying the bottle of wine. They could have followed him into the bushes and shot him there.

I walked to the shed and looked inside. It was, of course, empty except for some dusty garden tools.

Why would anyone, assuming they had a need to kill Gabe, follow him onto the beach? It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense. Gabe was gone, whoever had been in the garden shed had gone, and I needed time in the sun. I needed to heal.

I sat in one of the garden chairs, my back to the beach. Traffic soared along the high bridges spanning the canal, and beyond them the steam and smoke of the steel companies rose through a still-clear sky. I heard the warning blast from the lift bridge down the strip, and geese calling to each other as they passed overhead. I smelled the roses growing against the fence. None of the sounds and smells reached me the way they might have a day earlier. I was untouchable. I was distant. I was in free fall, waiting to land on solid ground. I was something else as well, but I didn’t want to think about that at the moment. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, feeling nothing except a sudden hand on my shoulder.

I jumped at the touch, spilling my coffee. I screamed as well, and I’m sure I swore before looking around to see Mel Holiday holding his hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have said something—”

“You should have knocked at the damn door,” I said.

“I did.” Mel lowered his hands. “Then I came around the side and saw you out here—”

“And decided to scare the hell out of me.”

“How are you doing?” Mel looked toward the shrubs behind the house. The two cops, their attention attracted by my scream, turned away.

“My sister is coming to stay with me. She’s arriving tonight.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s not. You asked me how I was doing. I just told you that my sister is coming to stay with me, probably for a week. That’s how badly things are going. And it looks like somebody was in the tool shed last night.” I pointed at the open door. “One of your guys?”

“I doubt it.” Mel walked to the shed and looked inside. The shed has two small windows. One faces the garden, the other faces the house. I watched Mel scan the interior, then the shed’s wooden floor. He bent to examine the area beneath the window facing the house, then stepped inside and looked through the window and up at the house. “Have you noticed anybody in the shed?” he asked when he returned.

“No, but I come out here some mornings and find the door opened or unlocked. I told Gabe about it. He didn’t think it was a big deal.”

Mel looked back at the shed. “It might be.” He looked at me. “You have a secret admirer. A pervert. Somebody’s been standing at that window and masturbating. That’s what it looks like.”

“Some mornings I lie on the cot over there,” I said, nodding my head toward the corner of the garden. “Sunbathing. People going by on the boardwalk can’t see into the corner because the trees and the shed block the view.”

“Anybody standing at the window in the shed could watch you,” Mel said.

“Great.” I felt sick.

“I’ll have a technician take samples from the stains on the floor. We might get his DNA profile from them.”

“See if you can get his phone number too. My sister’s on her way.”

Mel knelt next to the chair. “I know why you’re making jokes. Makes it easier to handle things.”

“You think it’s a joke? You’ve never met Tina.”

Mel took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Josie, there are only so many things I can do for you.”

“One thing you can do for me is tell Walter Freeman that Gabe did not shoot himself with his own gun.”

Mel stood up. “We’ll send the bullet that the coroner took out and another one from Gabe’s gun to forensics, and the paraffin test from his hand. We’ll get the results back next week.”

“Won’t prove a thing.”

“Hey.”

I looked up at Mel and was reminded how good he looked when he was angry. Some men are like that.

“If it makes it easier to believe somebody murdered your husband, go ahead and believe it,” he said. “But the rest of us, the people who have to deal with this stuff every day, we know a suicide when we see one. And I’m sorry if it’s painful for you.” He walked to the gate opening onto the boardwalk. “The technician should be here this afternoon. I’ll tell him to knock first.”

After Mel left, I went inside and had a slice of Maude’s banana bread with a spoonful of her marmalade on it. It made me feel so much better that I had another one. I had resumed eating. I had not ceased crying.

I answered the messages from friends who had called, beginning with Hans and Trudy, building their German castle on the beach strip as though it were on the Rhine. Gabe and I had enjoyed their company the few times we got together. Hans likes the same kind of jazz as Gabe, and Trudy bakes a killer strudel, which she always brought along. What wasn’t to like? “You come by, have strudel and tea,” Hans said in something between a command and an invitation. I promised I would.

Debbie, a friend from my days at the veterinary hospital, called from Toronto, inviting me to stay with her in her high-rise condo on Bloor Street, thirty-six floors above the muggers. I politely declined.

I called Dewey Maas, the last man I dated before I met Gabe. Dewey burst into tears at the sound of my voice. He had heard the news about Gabe and called once, but didn’t want to bother me by calling again until … well, until I called him. Dewey is a sweetheart of a guy for whom I felt every attraction but sexual. I have never fully understood that. Neither has Dewey, whose name is actually Byron, which is silly enough to make a nickname like Dewey preferable.

I met Dewey while working at a veterinary office, as receptionist and bookkeeper. Dewey was an animal groomer, working out of a storefront beneath his condominium. In the morning, people brought Dewey their dogs to be washed, trimmed, brushed, and manicured, and Dewey spent his day talking to animals and listening to opera. Most people assumed Dewey was gay, which made some of the older women warm up to him in ways they wouldn’t if they believed he was straight. Dewey was neither gay nor straight. He dated both sexes, which made him more interesting but, as far as I was concerned, somehow less appealing. I mean, a divorced woman in her thirties has enough competition as it is from her own gender. Why double the odds against you?

Dewey had cried on the telephone when he heard I was marrying Gabe, which was the last time I had heard from him, and he cried into my ear now that Gabe was dead. “Please tell me you’ll let me help you through this,” he said between sniffs.

I told him I would.

“I’ll come and see you whenever you say,” he added.

I explained that my sister was on her way, and that she would be all the company I needed. Then I thanked him for his concern and said goodbye.

Humans engage in a lot of silly things, but platonic relationships between two single people of similar ages and different genders has to be among the silliest. Or maybe just the most uncomfortable.

THE FORENSICS TECHNICIAN ARRIVED after three o’clock, an overweight man with a fringe of hair that, in his dreams, might have been as thick as his moustache. I led him around the house to the shed. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, scraped the floor in front of the window, sealed the shed door with a strip of plastic tape with crime scene printed all over it, and left me alone to face Tina.