First Avenue (21 page)

Everyone seemed to be waiting, including
Pierre
and the policemen. She, too, sat at the table with nothing to do and waited. She had not taken
Sam
’s suggestion to find a new job, but what good would it do to work and watch and listen in
Pierre
’s dirty doughnut shop if he didn’t come back? What was there to see?

 
Without saying anything, the two policemen got up from the counter.
Pierre
watched them rise, but he did not move toward them or away. He stood still, smiled falsely, and nodded his head as if he were glad for their business.
Mr.
Polanski
would not give his customers a smile like that. There was no part of the smile in
Pierre
’s eyes. She looked at the policemen when they passed her table. There were no smiles in their eyes either. They were tall men, and one was much older than the other. Both had brown sticks hanging from their gun belts.

Once outside the older man pulled out his stick and twirled it. She thought the stick would fly off into the air. It did, but then it came back to the policeman’s hand. A string wrapped in the policeman’s fingers brought the stick back to him. Side by side the two policemen walked down
First Avenue
past her window in slow, practiced steps. They did not remind her at all of
Sam
Wright
.

Without saying anything
Pierre
went to the back again, leaving the two cups on the counter. He talked to
Bill
briefly and then walked out the front door. Like the policemen, he walked south on
First Avenue
. He didn’t tell her that her break was over.

She went to the counter and picked up the two plastic cups. There was coffee in both cups, too much to throw into the garbage. She took the cups to the back and emptied the coffee into the sink. It gathered in tiny rivulets and ran down the drain. She studied the splashed residue like a fortune-teller studying tea leaves. In her mind she saw
Pierre
standing beside the policemen and their strange indifference. They were not like any customers who had come before.

The absence of motion, rather than motion, reminded her she was not alone. She looked toward the front door, and in doing so, quickly passed
Bill
’s staring eyes. He had been watching her from the doughnut machine. She took a moment to prepare herself, then turned toward him with the same indifference she had seen in the policemen.

“If he wants to wait on people, he could at least clean up afterward,” she said to him if he were listening.

He was listening. Something changed in his face—a small change.

“He does what he wants with his business,”
Bill
said.

She walked back to the counter with a dishcloth and wiped it clean. They had left no money to ring into the register. She continued to wipe the counter slowly and thoroughly as though they had left behind a mess. They had left nothing behind.

The water was exceptionally still—low tide, no wind, no ships underway to provide an artificial disturbance. Each dip of the paddle left a ghostlike print on the flat water. The kayak cut straight across
Elliott
Bay
. The only sound
Sam
heard was from his paddle dipping in and out of the water. He wondered how far he would be heard if he called out.

As he passed the checkpoint where he usually looked at his watch, the crossing of the imaginary coordinates between the Space Needle in the Denny Regrade section of downtown and the lighthouse at Alki Point across the bay, he left the time hidden on his sleeve.

He should have gone to the funeral alone, he thought. He should have learned by now not to make things complicated. Had he forgotten the kindness he had once taken from another girl with warm brown eyes—such rare, undeserved kindness—and the mess he had made of it? He had been just a boy then, but what a mess he had made.

Leaving you? he remembered saying. I’m not leaving you. I never came for you. The summer is over. The job is over. Don’t you understand? All right. I’ll come back. I don’t know how soon, but I’ll come back.

It had taken a long time for him to go back—much longer than he had promised, although he had never promised when. After that summer he had things to do, a life to live. At eighteen he had not known what life he had already found, and he had not gone back—not until she was gone.

When he went back, he had meant to get away from his mistakes, not to find them again. He intended to breathe fresh air before starting again, before resuming his ordinary life after the interruption of marriage. He intended to convince himself that it was not entirely his fault that his wife had left and had given back to him what he had given that summer years before. He had taken all his vacation and had gone fishing with his uncle again. Why not? Find out if his hands could still do an honest day’s work. Find out if they had become too soft, if his stomach could still tolerate rough water. Rough water he could tolerate, but he found the going more difficult in the smooth, calm bay within sight of the fishing village.

The cannery was gone. The building was there, but the work was gone. Efficiency had come since he left. The fish went to floating factories instead of factories ashore. There was no longer a night-shift whistle that released young girls to waiting lovers, the smell of fish in the air like strong perfume carried with them into the waiting beds. The smell of fish was everywhere and was more pleasant than he had ever imagined. She had made no apology for that which could not be washed away, and he had not wished for one. He had given none of his own.

She was gone, gone farther than he could ever reach. “Cancer,” said the old man who ran the grocery squeezed between the dock and the processing plant. He was some relation of hers, although exactly how it was, the young fisherman never and still did not understand. There was much in that village he had not understood. He stood in front of the old man, nodding as though he understood, wondering if he could ask anything more or should leave it as it was. As it was, it was over. Did she ever forgive the boy who knew her for a time, accepted her generosity, left her with a broken promise?

“Cancer,” the old man repeated. “Six months ago.”

Would it have made any difference if he had gone back sooner? What could he have done that would have made any difference?

Odd though, that it was six months before—the same time his wife had found the poems about the Indian girl and had thrown them at him. It was not the poems. It was everything else. Why idealize what is gone and cannot be had? his wife had asked. Why not improve what is now? How can you improve what was never there, he had shouted as she walked out the last time. There had never been any ideal, he had wanted to say but did not because she was gone by then—only stupidity and shame and dishonesty.

“Did you know her?” the old man asked.

Yes, but not well.

“Do you want to buy something?”

Sam bought cigarettes, two packs, even though he didn’t smoke. He walked out of the store without asking more questions and up the street carrying the cigarettes until he came to a garbage can, always in short supply on the village road, and dropped the cigarettes onto the pile of refuse.

Did she find happiness? Did she find someone who was not afraid to say with pleasure and hope, “Mom, Dad, this is
Gloria
.”

“G-L-O-R-I-A,” he sang flatly as he paddled determinedly toward another dock. It was the only part of the old song he ever remembered. The girl, however, came back to him again and again in his dreams and in his poems—the only way he ever had the courage to face her.

“Goddamn poems,” he muttered softly between strokes of the paddle so that finally there was another sound on the water.

He gripped the paddle tighter, as he did when his hands became numb. They were used to cold air and cold water. Hard work would make them forget the cold, but it was not cold this morning. He dug his paddle deep into the water, again and again, until his shoulders burned with exertion.

He would be within her sight by now if she were there. If she were there, her light would find him. Over the last stretch of water he paddled toward the dock as if in a race with the waiting ferry that would demand the lane at any moment. He gulped in the crisp sea air, sent it deep into his lungs, and pushed it out again when it was all used up. Finally only yards from the dock and still in the dark, he had to stop. He stuck his paddle into the water as a brake on the left side of the kayak. The boat swung sharply toward the pier, nearly striking broadside against a piling. He extended his right hand to protect the boat. He must have won his silly race. There was no one else around.

He walked along the water to
Yesler Street
, where he crossed
Alaskan Way
. He watched for police cars. On the hill between Second Avenue and Third Avenue, he leaned into the incline and lowered his head like a weary pilgrim. She must have had a late call.

In the locker room he showered and put on his uniform. He sat on the bench in front of his locker, pulled out his black work shoes, and tossed his tennis shoes into the bottom of the locker. The shuffling noise of other men rose over the lockers, but he was alone in his row. As he bent over to tie his shoes, he felt tired—tired already and the shift had not begun. It was his first day back with six to go. Maybe it was not a late call that kept her away.

It was more complicated now that the women had come. They—these men who once made up the whole show—used to talk about work and women and make fun of each other all at one time, but they talked more quietly now, more carefully, as though someone might be listening in the next row. Maybe it wasn’t the women. Maybe he just had less to say.

He got a cup of coffee from the machine in the lunchroom and put it on the counter as he checked for mail in the roll call room. There was another report from
Markowitz
. He stood off to the side and read a summary of interviews from people who knew or must have known
Alberta
. “Vanished from the face of the earth,”
Markowitz
scribbled.

He saw familiar feet in small black shoes stop next to his.

“You look like an elephant stepped on your face,”
Katherine
said.

“Just reading the morning mail.”

She took the report from him, and he watched the elephant move its feet. On the other side of the room, the sergeant walked through the doors from the patrol office and announced roll call. The men waiting for his entrance began to line up on the first yellow line. He looked back to
Katherine
. He had no more than a few seconds to address her or move off to the line with the other men. If he looked away, it would be another day before he saw her again.

“I can give you a lift up the hill,”
Sam
said. He had never offered her a ride before.

“Thanks.” She smiled and her eyes brightened as if she and
Sam
were by themselves and there was no one else around. “I parked the car on F deck,” she said.

He nodded quickly, perhaps even abruptly, and walked over to the line where he studied the report in his hand. He did not watch her walk out the door. If someone else had seen her smile, he might have to tolerate silly grins and wisecracks. It was coming to that, now. He looked down to the paper in his hand. When the sergeant called his name, he responded with an appropriate tone of disinterest in a voice meant to fool them all.

In the car with the light off he waited for her to come. He could have filled out the log sheet and prepared for the day, but he had tossed his briefcase into the backseat. Her shadow appeared in the stairway. He heard the clipped sound of her hard heels on the deck. The car light remained off when she opened the door and slid into the front seat.

She said nothing, not “Hi” or “Sorry it took so long” or another phrase that would ease her into the seat. She breathed breathlessly, clandestinely. Still she said nothing and it was clear that he must begin or they might sit there for a long time.

“It was a long walk up the hill this morning. Guess I’m getting lazy.”

“We had a late call—a prowler on Queen Anne.”

“Catch anybody?”

“No.”

“Ghosts maybe.”

“Maybe.”

He started the car and circled up through the garage. Without looking he knew she was watching him. He was late enough to miss the usual jam of patrol cars at shift change. She directed him to where she parked, and he pulled over beside it.