Open Water (16 page)

“You’re an antiques dealer or a smut king?” Willis tossed his polarized glasses on the table.

Showalter flicked on the overhead light. “It’s simple manufacturing and sales. You could learn from me, you haven’t met your potential.”

“My potential? What do you know about my potential?” Willis said.

Showalter told him, “I have an eye for material.”

“Put your eyes back in,” Willis said.

“Take a minute to listen to my ideas,” Showalter said.

“Where’s the exit from here? Where’s the bulkhead?”

“I’ll take you upstairs, but wait a second. I want you to take a minute. Think about it.”

Willis was walking ahead.

They boarded the elevator and found opposite corners.

Fritz told Willis, “He wants us for a fag scene. Us together. I said we won’t do it.”

Willis stared at Fritz as the elevator strained. They hit the first floor and the accordion gate popped open.

Willis shouldered his way off the platform, but Showalter kept stride. He was reciting studio fees, adding them up to attract Willis. Showalter wasn’t getting through to Willis and switched his approach. “I’m also looking for drivers plain and simple. I’m having trouble with distribution. The mail is tricky. I had someone over here asking me questions about my mail-order business. I have some front material, Audubon subjects, birds and insects. I showed
that inventory. Flowers, 3-D rhododendron—it packs a wallop. All that Sierra Club material. Just the same, they’re sniffing. I might have to deliver merchandise by courier. You interested?”

“Four Eyes Smut Will Travel?” Willis said.

Showalter smiled. “That’s deliciously tasteless, but we need something incognito,” Showalter said. “If not you, someone can make a little money. Moonlighting is lucrative these days. Have you got a steady day job?”

“WASTEC.”

“But you haven’t driven a trailer for a week.”

Willis said, “What is this? You have a telescope or something? You can watch Cranston from here?”

“It is my understanding that you don’t have a steady job.”

Willis stopped in his tracks. He turned around to look at the man’s face to see just what he was implying.

“Jobs are hard to come by,” Showalter said with a stainless voice, not empathy, not ridicule. Showalter walked them over to where they had left the dead birds in their cardboard boxes. Fritz accepted his two hundred dollars and started to peel some bills for Willis, but Willis shoved it away. They turned to leave.

Showalter stopped them. He paid Fritz another fifty to dispose of the birds’ remains, but he was talking to Willis. Willis seemed to attract his attention more than Fritz could. Showalter told Willis, “Get rid of these in Rhode Island, not in the commonwealth. Rhode Island keeps its eyes closed tighter.”

“Sure,” Willis told him, but he didn’t exhibit any further commitment.

Showalter said, “I’m going to try another source. He guarantees live delivery. Of course you pay more for guaranteed
wildlife. Tonight was one thing. I took a chance—”

Willis was outside before Showalter finished.

Showalter was saying, “Maybe the next time we’ll do better. You know, these birds can be trained to talk—”

Willis was already pacing down the sidewalk. He drove the car away. “You should find a better crowd,” Willis told Fritz.

“What crowd? You’re my crowd.”

“This Showalter gink. Show-me-yours. Show-you-mine.”

“Just call him Gene. Gene Showalter,” Fritz said.

“
Mr.
Show-me-yours.”

Fritz said, “Point. Here’s two hundred. New bills, I’ve got paper cuts.”

“Two hundred isn’t shit.” Willis drove to a rural area in Warren where he knew about an old landfill that had been officially closed down. The property was permanently sealed off with a big gate made from mortared telephone poles to keep dump trucks from unloading, but Willis and Fritz were able to walk right in through a pedestrian opening in the fence. The dump was used as a shooting range and they walked across a carpet of shotgun shells and low dunes of tiny lead pellets like black fish eggs. Willis shouldered a carton of exotic death, but he couldn’t handle any more with his bad arm and Fritz took the others.

Willis pictured the weekend sportsmen nailing several rounds into the feathered corpses. It didn’t feel right. Willis found an empty barrel behind a stack of rusty corrugated roofing material. Willis dropped the box of birds off his shoulder right into the empty barrel. Fritz stacked his boxes on top of that. Willis wanted to have a last look at the birds. He took one of the birds from the top carton and held it for Fritz. Fritz had a Penlite and he scrawled the tiny wafer of
light over the dead animal. It was one of the yellow-fronted Amazons. Willis pushed his index finger through the bird’s soft breast feathers; the iridescent sheen of the lime-colored down had an intensity of color Willis couldn’t disconnect from. He ruffled the feathers under his thumb, exposing variegated chartreuse swatches. He stretched a wing open, counting its serrated coverts. The bird’s flight feathers were deeper green. He let the wing fold back. The bird’s face was startling. Across its yellow crown and hooked bill was a convincing, placid wisdom.

Willis smoothed the bird with the palm of his hand. The bird’s eyes were clear amber, like drops of caramelized sugar.

It was almost dawn when Willis left Fritz and drove home to Rennie’s house. The house was getting overgrown with vines and needed a pressure-cleaning job, but Willis liked the buildup of woody fingers. He went upstairs to his room and fell back on the bed. The quilt was fresh, Rennie must have washed it and hung it out on the T-bars. He could smell the salty beach air which had a positive affect on the polyester filling. Rennie knew he would end up just where he was, no matter how complicated his nights. He was thinking of Fritz, how Fritz couldn’t manage his greed. He could hear the wind tugging through the screens, which always sounded good against the background surf. He was surprised to hear Rennie’s footsteps coming onto the porch. He recognized the way she stamped three times, her slight weight shifting from one foot to the other, getting the sand off. She must have been down on the beach or out in the detached garage where she kept extra cooking pots that wouldn’t fit in the cupboards. Maybe she had fired up the
kiln, but Rennie had stopped making jewelry when she ran out of powder glazes, and she didn’t want to restock.

She must have seen the car parked in front, the silvery zigzag on the windshield. He listened to her arrange canned goods in the lazy Susan; he knew the way she liked the soup stacked, consommé in front. He was drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the sea roll and flatten down the slope of the dune. Again, he was alert. For Willis, the first stretch of sleep was always bracketed by fears. Was it rest after work, or the difficult work of finding rest? The preparatory stillness before unforeseeable events. The calm before or the calm after?

He fumbled through the top drawer of his night table and found the card of drugs. He removed the foil and plowed it in. Willis felt one moment of regret. His regret made him angry, but he didn’t blame Rennie for sharing her morphine. She gave him the little boxes with the belief that it was a legitimate prescription from an authorized chemist. They might have been sweet orange tablets of St. Joseph’s baby aspirin. Maybe she was shutting her eyes to it because she was dying and wanted his company in her scary routines. Rennie didn’t seem to know that he was in over his head. She had enough to contend with directing her own decline.

He listened to the house noises, the heating pipes knocking, room to room. He felt suddenly at ease, the way people feel immediately better when placed in oxygen tents and they don’t have to concentrate on the pull of their lungs. Then he smelled yeast rolls, the first wave of scent from the preheated oven, a flood of cinnamon rising through the warped floorboards.

In his altered sleep the birds awakened. Their beaded eyes tightened and expanded in an intelligent perusal. They flapped their bright magenta wings, fanned their crests. They perched on the piebald doors of the car and flew inside the windows, lined up along the dash like bowling trophies. The birds stared at Willis. Screeched. The sound they emitted was both wild and familiar, a fiery squawk without accusation or insult, like the sound of someone stepping on a house cat. Just an announcement. A presence. Here I am.

I
t was afternoon when Willis came downstairs. Rennie was sitting in the old captain’s chair; its arms were polished by her sweater sleeves. The chair’s uncomfortable spindles looked like fossilized bones Willis had seen in a
National Geographic.
The hard chair had always been Rennie’s spot. Willis had replaced the Fresnel lens in its usual place on the narrow sill beneath the fanlight. The sun burst through the glass throwing distorted shamrocks across the walls. Willis stooped and gave Rennie a kiss, holding his cast against his waist to keep it from bumping her.

“How much longer do you need that?” Rennie said.

“Four weeks.”

“It’s filthy, maybe we can use some kitchen wax on it. Simonize it. I have a bottle in the cupboard.”

He took a homemade sweet roll from the Spode plate, letting its heavenly weight register in his hand. The pastry was laden with egg and ripped apart in long feathers of yellow cake. It was something he could eat without sitting down at the table. She often offered him these portable servings, letting him stand at the window, or pace around, ruffling through papers and magazines, as if he was looking for his own belongings and couldn’t find anything familiar.

She gave him a mug of tea and dropped a spoon in it to pull the heat off. Willis looked down at a bowl of kidneys soaking in milk. The deep umber knots glistened like fart opals in the white broth. She told him she was making a stew, the milk absorbs any uric acid left in the meat.

Rennie knew that Willis felt uncomfortable when she planned the meals ahead of time. Stew required a commitment from him to show up. He was telling her, “I might not make it.”

“Your way with words,” Rennie said, “it’s always refreshing. Let’s not cringe at routine pleasantries—”

“Shit. Didn’t I say good morning? I swear I said it.”

“I’m not keeping track. How’s the car? How is it running for you?”

“You saw it? The crack in the windshield?”

“Can’t miss it.”

“I got behind a gravel truck spilling asphalt mix. I’ll get it fixed next week. Maybe you’ve got the insurance for something like that, a gravel truck—”

“Windshields are tricky when you live by the seaside.
We
say it’s a gravel truck, but they say that since we park it on the water, it’s sand blowing on a daily basis, making little pocks and ruining the glass. They’ll fight it.”

“This is a regular smashed windshield, Rennie, they won’t try to prove it was blowing sand.”

“It’s Amica. They’re testy.
You
call and tell them that story.” Rennie walked over to the sideboard and penned something in a little notebook.

“Is that a shopping list?” Willis asked.

She shut the little notebook and dropped the pen on its cover.

Rennie said, “Do you want kale soup? I’ve still got winter kale in the garden. It’s tough. It’s holding on.”

“Look. Stop the production.”

“It’s good to have you back from Norfolk. How long have you been back? Two, three months? First month doesn’t count. You weren’t exactly clean and sober. You still using my stash? Do I have to go to CVS and get more?”

“Well, shouldn’t you have it on hand? I mean, in case you need it yourself?”

“I’ll get refills. Maybe you can do some work around here—”

“Sure I will. Exactly what?”

“We could do some reshingling,” she said. She didn’t sound serious.

“Sure. I’ll get some cedar shingles. Next week.”

“It’s Munro,” Rennie told him. “He’s getting counsel. He’s not going to let us stop his plans—”

“He was lucky I didn’t kill him. I told you, don’t worry about him.”

“He says I can’t take care of the house anymore. There’s a problem with cash flow.”