Authors: Sean Carswell
You're back in the Vehicle Assembly Building, indoors but three hundred feet off the ground. The air up here is dead and thick. You can't stop sweating. You're laying down the final weld on the handrail that surrounds this platform. Even though you're kneeling on a platform rather than standing on the typical narrow I-beam, even though this handrail is all around and you know it will stay in place because you built it, the height scares the hell out of you. You try to ignore the fear. You push everything out of your mind except the flame at the end of your torch and you finish the weld.
While the metal is still glowing hot, you turn down your flame, stand, and lift your mask. The sight beside you on this platform startles you. It's Libra. She's wearing a shear little sundress. She's dry but everything else about her looks fresh out of the shower: no make-up, her auburn hair tucked behind her ears, her freckles sparkling under the fluorescent work lights. This is the Libra you know best. No airs. Nothing done to prepare her for public. Just Libra. You're not sure why she's on this platform with you, three hundred feet off the ground, but you figure it's just as likely as any other scenario in your life right now. You say to her, “Hey, kid. What brings you here?”
“I wanted to show you my new shoes,” she says. She lifts her leg so you can see her sandals. The straps are leather and every part of the shoe that touches Libra's skin is made out of a fluffy wool. They actually look pretty comfortable.
“Very nice,” you say.
“I got them for Florida. To celebrate us coming here. Aren't they fun?”
You've never understood how a shoe can be fun. You've never understood why Libra would get so happy just from purchasing an item at a store. It's never had an appeal to you. Still, you recognize the joy in her eyes and you nod. “Fun.”
“Do you like the colors on my dress?”
“I do,” you say. And you're not just humoring her. Her dress is yellow with little pink and orange flowers on it. Very girly, but the colors are somehow comforting. The dress drapes her torso, soft and free, barely hiding everything that you've come to memorize underneath.
“I'm thinking of painting our house these colors. The insides. Add a little life to those white walls. What do you think?”
“I could do without the pink.”
Libra gives you a coy smile. “No pink? I love pink! Maybe we could just do the bathroom in pink. Or, you know what? I'll paint my closet pink.” She raises her eyebrows and gives you a look like she's just discovered radium.
You find it charming. You don't know if you've ever had this optimism, if you've ever fallen into a smile this easily. It's fun to live vicariously through Libra's joy.
Libra looks down at her leg. A little cartoon birthmark seems to be growing on her ankle. She says, “I think I'm the whitest girl in Florida, but I don't want to get a tan. Tans give you wrinkles.”
“You're a beautiful girl,” you tell her. You reach out for her hand but forget you're still holding the torch. The flame slices through her wrist. Her hand drops on the sheet metal platform. A hollow echo rings through the VAB. You know welding torches don't cut through skin like this, but you've seen what you've seen. How else can you make sense of it? You reach out to tell her you're sorry, but the torch is still in your hand. It slices through her leg, just below the hip. Her leg starts to fall. You move to wrap her in your arms. The torch won't stop cutting. It strips her skin from her chest. Libra's coming to pieces in front of your eyes. The platform below you starts to give and fall. Libra quick reaches for her head and pulls it off her shoulders. You and all the pieces of Libra tumble into the hole. You fly around, chasing the leg and the hand, trying to weld the skin back together, stretching it over the moist and sticky muscle beneath. The ground races up toward you. Libra's head remains in its place three hundred feet in the air. You try to swim up there, but gravity works the same for everyone. It drags you down. You start to fall for real and do everything you can to save yourself.
Just when vertigo is about to take over, you land in your bed on Woodland Avenue. Your sheets are covered in sweat. The green light of the smoke alarm stares down at you. All the pieces of Libra have been replaced by empty air.
Bart took me to Duke's. That was the last big thing that happened on my first week back.
He had insisted on taking me on a bar tour of Cocoa Beach. Hitting all the old joints. Re-acclimating me with my hometown. Mostly, I think he wanted to go out drinking and was happy to have a partner in crime. We ran through a series of sports bars and dive bars and crusty beach joints full of local barnacles stuck to the barstools and we ended up at a Duke's down around 22
nd
Street. The joint was actually called Duke Kahanamoku'sâafter the surfing legendâbut the locals couldn't be bothered trying to learn all the syllables in Kahanamoku's. So Duke's.
We walked into the tiki and bamboo and straw, and I caught a glimpse of the bartender. She was a short, tough, half-Japanese chick in baggy jeans and a tight, white tank top. She had a tattoo of a big-headed, big-eyed doll on her shoulder. The tattoo matched her just right. Who else could it be but Helen: with the face that launched a dozen Greyhounds?
I had no idea how this scene was going to play out. I hadn't seen Helen since a few hours before Sophie stabbed me. Last she heard from me, I'd left her house, told her I'd call her the next day, and disappeared for four years. Now, I didn't know whether to expect a smile or a slap in the face.
Bart pulled up a barstool. Helen saw him and smiled. She took a mug from behind the bar and started pouring him a draft. Once the tap was flowing, she looked up and saw who Bart's friend was. She stopped the tap. “Holy fucking shit!” she said.
I was up to the bar at this point. Helen climbed onto the beer cooler, kneeled on the bar, and leaned in toward me. I braced myself. Helen gave me a big hug. This surprised me. I squeezed right back. Took a deep breath to smell her hair. Oh yeah, I thought, I remember that Helen smell.
She whispered in my ear, “I'm never gonna sleep with you again.” She let go of me and climbed off the bar.
I thought, hey, I'm just saying hello, here. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. But I was too stunned by the comment. And besides, don't you know I was thinking about it?
A group of tourists walked in right about then, all flowered shirts and sunburns and socks and sandals. Helen said, “We'll talk soon.” And she was back to tending the bar.
She finished pouring Bart's draft and gave me the same without asking, then took the tourists' orders. The bar was fairly crowded. Helen floated around behind it, mixing drinks, pulling drafts, telling jokes, listening to stories, popping a drunk guy in the head when he tried to get a free refill off the taps, making sure everyone at the bar knew everyone else. She was a natural. I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I started thinking way too much about the past, about the year we'd spent together and all those old feelings and those daydreams I had about her and me. It was kinda overwhelming. I watched Helen and thought, I can't believe I left this woman just because I got stabbed a few times. I'm such a pussy.
I did not drink the beer she poured for me.
By about eleven o'clock, the bar had pretty much cleared out and I was drinking soda and Bart was drunk and playing pinball. I'd talked to Helen on and off all night. It was good to be near her again. She came up to me at the end of the night and handed me a deck of tarot cards. “Mix these up,” she said. “Get your energy in them.” She handed me a bar towel.
I wiped up the bar in front of me and pushed the towel aside. I looked at the tarot. It was an erotic deck. All the cards had artfully drawn naked people on them. Some of the people were having sex. I shuffled the cards a few times. I laid them all out on the bar, mixed them up, picked them up, and handed the deck back to Helen.
Helen shuffled the cards once and broke the deck into three equal stacks. She dealt three cards, one off the top of each stack. She flipped one card at a time, starting from the left and working her way right. She looked at the cards quickly, said, “That makes sense,” and put the deck away.
I figured that she was doing the reading for me, since she'd had me handle the cards. I said, “What did the cards say about me?”
“Do you want to know your future, Danny?” Helen asked.
“Yeah,” I said, though, really I didn't want to know.
“Things'll get worse before they get better.”
“Is that what the cards say?”
“No,” Helen said. “I did that reading for me.”
“Then why do you say that? Why are things gonna get worse?”
“Because I know you,” Helen said.
And damn if she wasn't right.
By Aprilâtwo months after I'd gotten back to Cocoa BeachâI had a sidekick and a shadow. The sidekick was Taylor, the little girl who I'd made cry on my first day back. I'm not sure exactly why it happened, but she latched onto me almost right away. And, yeah, maybe it was weird to be spending so much time with a preteen girl. I was cool with it, though.
Taylor started by shouting out insults every time she saw me. I never responded other than to smile and wave. Because there was no way I was gonna make her cry again. Not on purpose. She teased me a lot about my surfing that first week. But by the end of that week, I was back in form. I could even get some speed out of that little board. And, for some reason, Taylor seemed to be down at 3
rd
Street North every time I surfed.
By the second week, I could do some tricks again. Taylor noticed this and stopped ragging me about my surfing and started ragging me about my belly. That was okay by me. I was happy with my belly.
On my fourth week back in Cocoa Beach, Taylor showed up at my house just as I was about to head out surfing. I'm sure she timed it that way. I surfed every afternoon at three o'clock. Right after work. Taylor had on this red spring suit. It was too loose on her to really keep her warm. She also had a fat, purple, twin fin surfboard. Between the wetsuit and the surfboard, she looked like the “don'ts” half of a “dos and don'ts” section in a surfing magazine, circa 1985. “Will you teach me how to surf?” she asked.
“Where'd you get that set up?”
“My stepdad,” she said. “He told me you used to be the best surfer in Cocoa Beach. Will you teach me how?”
“Who's your stepdad?”
“Paul Stromme. He's says he went to high school with you.”
I ran the name through my head a few times, but it didn't sound familiar. “I don't remember him.”
“He's kind of a redneck,” Taylor said.
I chewed on this for a second. Was her stepdad a black redneck? Not that there was no such thing. I'd spent enough time in Florida to know a few black rednecks. I thought of one guy in particular who was in the union with me when I was an iron worker. I tried to remember his name. It wasn't Paul. I was pretty sure of that. And I didn't go to high school with him. And, while I was at it, there was no reason for me to think that Taylor's stepdad had to be black. It was probably more likely that her mom had married a white redneck.
Taylor snapped me out of all of these thoughts. She said again, “Will you teach me to surf?”
I shrugged. What the hell? I was heading out, anyway. I grabbed my board, and Taylor and I walked the three blocks to the beach.
I'd never successfully taught anyone to surf. I'd tried a few times, but it didn't really work out. I didn't know how to teach it. I told Taylor to just follow me, and I told her everything I was doing and why. The first couple of days were rough for her, but really, she got the hang of it in no time.
By the time I'd been in Cocoa Beach for two months, Taylor was already pretty good. Partly because I'd made enough money working at a metal shop to buy a new board for myself. Since I was still too big for my old shortboard, I gave it to Taylor. Well, I didn't quite give it to her. Bart convinced me that people would see it as creepy enough that I was hanging out every day with a twelve-year-old girl. If I started giving that girl presents, he'd start calling me Humbert Humbert. So I sold the board to Taylor for ten bucks. She skipped her school lunch for a week to save up the money. I felt kinda bad for her, missing meals. It was better in the end, I thought, because now she could feel like she earned something and maybe it would inspire her and maybe when she got better than me and better than most of the girls on this coast, she could go pro and have a great story about this fat, weird guy in her neighborhood and how she bought her first board off him.
So Taylor and I were out surfing and she was really taking to the new Rainbow. She couldn't do any tricks or anything, but she had learned how to catch waves early and how to ride the face of the wave and that's most of the battle. Once you learn that, everything else is gravy.
It was a pretty good day to be out. The water was warm again and the waves were kinda small, just over knee high, but they had good form and enough power to push my fat ass. I was having a lot of fun out there until I looked back to shore and saw a dude in a wheelchair sitting on the boardwalk.
I didn't know the dude. I didn't know anyone who rode a wheelchair. But I sat out there in the ocean, keeping one eye east for waves creeping across the horizon and one eye west on the wheelchair guy. He was my shadow. He seemed to show up everywhere I went. He'd been to the metal shop where I worked and he'd been to Helen's bar and I'd even seen him sitting in a van outside of the duplex that Bart and I shared. He had long, sandy brown hair and a green army jacket. It was a bit warm out for the jacket. He looked like a Vietnam vet.
As I waited for the next wave, it occurred to me that, when I was a kid, I used to see guys like him everywhere: wheelchair vets. Brother Joe had fought in Vietnam and he had a couple of buddies like this guy in the chair. But those guys were gone now. All the vets I used to see around seemed to be gone. I sat out in the ocean and tried to figure out what happened to them all. Had they died off? Were they in VA hospitals? Were they hanging out at freeway onramps with cardboard signs? Had they assimilated back into society so completely that you'd never recognize them if they didn't happen to take a nap around you and wake up screaming? Does PTSD wear off? It was all a mystery to me.
What was not a mystery to me was the reason why this dude showed up everywhere I went. I felt pretty certain he was the private investigator that Bart had predicted.
I was so wrapped up in my head that I missed two sets of waves and may have missed a third set if Taylor hadn't said, “Danny, this is your wave.”
I caught the wave. As soon as I felt the momentum of the ocean, I stopped thinking about the wheelchair dude. I stopped thinking at all and let instinct take over, ripping a big cut off the lip and curling into the whitewash and whipping back into the wave. I rode for a few seconds there. When the wave closed out, I rode the whitewash into shore.
I sat on shore and watched Taylor while the wheelchair dude watched me. I'd been keeping an eye on him while I was surfing, but I didn't notice a camera then. When I sat on the beach, the dude pulled out his camera. I knew this because I was looking straight at him when he took my picture. He had to be a P.I. Had to be.
I tried to ignore him until I could figure out what to do. If he hadn't been in a wheelchair, I would've just walked over and punched him. I would've hit him enough times for him to get the point that he should stop following me. But I couldn't do that to a guy in a wheelchair. Especially a veteran, which, of course I didn't know if he was one or not, but still. I couldn't hit him and I'd have to figure out a different way to handle this. For starters, I stopped looking in his direction.
I watched Taylor instead. She caught her last wave. The kid was doing all right. She had a funny way of standing on her board: she leaned forward with her knees hardly bent at all. It reminded me of the way girls used to dance a few years earlier. There was even an R&B song where the singers danced like that in the video. Every time Taylor would stand on her board like that, I'd start singing to myself, “Don't go chasing waterfalls.” Which was the only line from the R&B song that I knew. It drove me nuts.
Anyway, my own mania notwithstanding, Taylor was doing pretty well out there on her surfboard. She wasn't great, yet. But give her a year. Maybe she'd become the superhero and I'd be the sidekick.
I kept watching waves and thinking too much and not really thinking at all until Taylor was sitting on the beach next to me.
“You're getting the hang of this surfing thing, huh?” I said.
“Starting to.” Taylor unhooked her leash from her foot and wrapped it around the tail of her board.
“Having fun?”
Taylor nodded. She looked out at the ocean. This was my little ceremony after surfing. Whenever I was done, I liked to sit on the beach and look at the waves. To try to understand what I'd ridden and how I could've ridden them better. To try to make sense of what I saw under me in the ocean, and what it would look like from shore. I don't know if Taylor was doing the same thing or just imitating me, but she'd usually sit down and stare east, too.
After a couple of minutes, Taylor said, “Are you losing your belly, Danny?”
It was true that I had lost a little bit of bulk since I'd been back in Florida. Fewer hot dogs, almost no beer, a lot of surfing. I hadn't been on a scale to see what the weight difference was, but I did have to tighten my belt one notch. “Maybe a little,” I said. “I hope I don't lose too much.”
“Huh?”
“Lose your belly and you lose your center,” I said. “It makes surfing tougher.” Taylor looked at me like I was crazy and I guess she didn't get that I was kidding around. I let it drop. I kept staring in the direction of the ocean, but really, I was obsessing on that wheelchair dude. I tried to convince myself that he had nothing to do with the rich, white girl I'd left dead on the tracks in Flagstaff. I tried to ignore the reality that stabbed me in the gut every time I thought about Libra.
After a couple of minutes, Taylor said, “Why do you have so many tattoos, Danny?”
“ 'Cause I think they look cool.”
“What do they mean?”
I shrugged. “Point at a tattoo and I'll tell you what it means.” Taylor pointed to the hula girl on my left forearm. “That one doesn't mean anything,” I said. I balled my left fist and squeezed it a couple of times. Not much happened to the hula girl. “She was supposed to dance, but she doesn't really.”
Taylor pointed to my right shoulder. “Why do you have the number forty-two on your arm?”
“That's the answer.”
“To what?”
“The ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.”
Taylor was really starting to master her
you're crazy, Danny
look. I knew she didn't get the joke. I let that dangle, too.
Taylor pointed at my chest, the left side, just above the heart. I had a tattoo of two machetes crossed and under the head of a monkey.
“That was my first tattoo,” I said. “My brother Joe drew it. It had something to do with Vietnam. He and all his buddies got this tattoo. Kinda like a gang, but not really. I was like their mascot. So Brother Joe asked me if I wanted one, too, and of course I did, so he used a homemade gun and gave me this sucker when I was fifteen.”
“Fifteen!” Taylor said. “What did your parents think?”
“I didn't have parents,” I said. “Brother Joe raised me.”
Taylor looked at me to see if I was full of shit. Of course, I wasn't. Taylor said, “I don't have a dad.”
“Who gave you that crappy wetsuit and board, then?”
“My stepdad.”
I nodded. “What happened to your dad?”
“Who knows?” Taylor said.
I could tell that she still wanted to talk about this, but I didn't really know how to draw it out of her. I kept looking at the ocean. I figured that, if I just waited long enough, she'd say something else. She did.
She said, “Do you know what the most confusing day in Harlem is?”
“No,” I said.
Taylor said, “Father's Day.”
I didn't laugh. I'd heard that joke before. Live long enough in blue-collar Florida and you'll hear every racist joke. I didn't think this one was funny the first time, but it was even less funny when a little black girl who'd been abandoned by her father told it to me.
“Laugh,” Taylor said. “It's funny.”
“It's bullshit,” I said.
Taylor stood up and grabbed the Rainbow. “You're a fucking jerk,” she said. She started to walk away. I got up to follow her. The wheelchair dude snapped our picture.
“Wait,” I said.
Taylor paused. “What?” she said.
“I'll make you a promise,” I said. “If I ever meet that son of a bitch dad of yours, I'll kick his ass.”
As quickly as Taylor had gotten mad, she calmed back down. She even smiled and waited for me to walk up to her. “It's a deal,” she said.
We crossed the beach and headed up the boardwalk toward home. The wheelchair dude rolled over to one side so that we could pass. Taylor walked by him first, then me. I nodded to him as I scooted past. He said, “Danny McGregor?” Like he'd just realized who I was. Like he hadn't been following me for a month. Or, I guess more like he just wanted to be sure that he had the right guy.
I said, “Yeah?”
And then I asked myself, why are you so fucking stupid?