Disturbed Earth (29 page)

37

When I realized I'd fallen asleep at the wheel, I began to panic. I was desperate, I'd been up all night, it was almost morning, I didn't know how long I could go on.

The road was slick and bumpy, the van seemed out of control as raw brush along the shoulder scratched at my door. The Golden Nets Beach Club was at the end of a long narrow road off the highway, past Breezy Point where the shacks were.

It was remembering the nets, Billy's net, the fishing with my father that made me recall a place I'd been with Maxine years earlier, when the twins were still little. It wasn't much to go on, but I was crazy enough to try.

At the entrance to the beach club was a concrete hut; in the summer you paid a fee or showed your season pass or asked about the availability of cabanas. It was streaked with salt, dirt and snow, and it was empty, shut up for the winter.

I drove through and parked at the back of the main building, a white wood structure that looked as if it dated from the 1930s. Signs, dripping with snow and fog, announced summer hours and pool openings, mahjong tournaments and a yoga class.

I put my gun in my waistband, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, got out, locked the van and walked around to the front of the club on foot and went up the stairs to the main deck.

The light from my flash illuminated part of the huge deck where there were three swimming pools, all empty. Near the entrance was a cafe with large glass windows and when I peered through one of them I could see a few tattered nets that had been painted gold and hung on the walls for decoration.

On the far side of the deck was a railing and then the beach and the ocean, but I couldn't see the water and I could barely see the sand. Surrounding the deck were the cabanas, a long row of little wooden huts with the doors locked. In the summer, the doors open, there would be deck chairs in front of the cabanas. People in bathing suits would run in and out, laughing, eating, talking. There was also an upper level, with more cabanas and smaller lockers, that you reached by a long wooden staircase.

Vaguely, as if in a long-forgotten dream, I remembered the scene: the little kids running and screaming in and out of the baby pools; older kids showing off on the diving board; the brightly colored deck chairs, green and white, and the oiled bodies of women in bikinis; the older men, their bellies hanging over their shorts, playing checkers or cards at rickety card tables. A jumble of color, yellow sun, blue pools, the azure ocean, it was like a child's drawing of paradise.

Except for my flash, it was pitch dark. As I made my way along the ground level, I heard something, the constant banging of a door to one of the cabanas; somewhere in the fog, a door was hanging loose on its hinges, banging constantly; I couldn't see it until it was in front of me. I yanked it open and turned the flashlight on the interior.

Inside was a big old fashioned humpback refrigerator, the enamel chipped; a microwave sat on a card table next to a small TV. There were three canvas chairs. Behind a plastic curtain with seashells on it was a shower. There was also a large wooden locker painted green. It was locked.

With a pocket knife I pried the lock open and pulled back the lid. Inside were pots and pans, an electric kettle and faded beach towels. Nothing else. I went back out. I closed the door and twisted the wire that held it shut. From somewhere there seemed to be a faint sound, but it was only the water, I told myself, only the wind. I climbed the stairs to the second level.

Near where I stood was a long row of lockers for people who didn't have cabanas and used them to change and stash their clothes while they swam. The other side of the narrow platform where I stood, away from the lockers, was a high wire fence with barbed wire on top. Through it, when I turned the flashlight to my right, I could see the parking lot. The way the light fell, the long alley of lockers ahead of me on one side and the high wire wall on the other, it looked like a jail, a row of cells, a lock-up.

To keep myself calm, I lit a cigarette and tossed the match away and thought, for a second because I was half out of my mind with fatigue, that I hadn't put it out. The old wooden club would go up in flames in a second. I waited. Nothing happened, but again I heard the faint noise. This time I knew it wasn't the wind or water; a tiny creaking noise, not far away from where I stood, reached me. I held my breath. From where I was I could barely see a foot ahead.

Slowly I felt my way down the row of lockers, the rough wood icy and wet under my hand. I reached the last door in the row and it was ajar and I wanted to turn and run as ghosts seemed to rise up out of the fog, but I pulled it open. I turned the flashlight on the interior.

From the ceiling hung a fixture for a single bulb. The bulb had been removed. By a piece of heavy rope hung a cat. The noise I'd heard came from the faint creak of the wooden ceiling as the dead cat swung in the wind that blew through the cracks between the wood slats of the locker.

Scruffy, orange and white. I unhooked it. It was frozen stiff. The wire coat hanger it was hanging from came off in my hand. I put the dead cat on the floor.

I went on, turned the corner, looking in locker after locker. At the end of the row, closest to the beach and the ocean, were four big cabanas, like cottages, overlooking the sweep of the Atlantic Ocean. All of them were padlocked and bolted. Again, as with the cat, I thought I heard a faint sound.

One at a time, I leaned up against the doors, my ear against the wood planks, trying not to breathe. At the last one, I thought I heard something. My gun was in my hand. I tried the door handle; the door wouldn't give and the walls were solid. There was a window, though and I used the butt of my gun to chip away enough glass to loosen the frame, then pulled out part of the pane and reached through it and unlocked the window.

The dread I felt had a palpable shape, it took a solid form, it filled the space with horror and I almost backed away and turned and ran, but there was nowhere to go.

Billy? Billy?

I was talking to myself. Shoving open the broken window, I climbed through and stepped down into the wire mesh of the window screens that were piled on the floor for the winter. The metal mesh caught at my ankle and I pulled my foot out and I heard the wire rip. I turned my flashlight on the room. There was a table, three plastic chairs, a TV on a stand; outdoor furniture was neatly stacked.

At the far side of the room was a door and from behind it came the sound I had heard except it was louder now. I stumbled against the table in the semi-darkness.

Billy?

Someone was in the bathroom. Billy, I thought. Billy. I yanked the door open.

38

The first thing I saw when I turned the beam of my flashlight on the room was a tangled mess of gold colored fishing nets like those I'd seen in the beach club cafe. Trapped in them like a large animal was Heshey Shank. He was a big man and his body sprawled across the bathroom floor, his feet under the rusty sink, his head near a toilet with a broken seat. Above him from a white plastic rod hung a shower curtain with clowns on it that was smeared with blood.

The nets were heavy; they were draped over him and twisted around his limbs, head and arms. I crouched beside him. Blood was everywhere. He was naked from the waist up. A faint animal noise came out of his mouth.

I pushed my hand through the nets, my fingers caught in the knotted strings, and tried to find a pulse in his neck. The flesh was still warm, though a sheen of cold clammy wetness clung to it. The flesh was cut, I could feel it, and when I put the flashlight on Shank, I saw small chunks had been cut out of his cheek, one of his arms, his shoulder.

Again I felt for a pulse, but there was none and even while I tried, desperate, frantic, to untangle him, the noise stopped. Shank was dead. It was as if he had waited for me before he gave up, or maybe not, maybe he had been dead for hours. I couldn't tell.

On the floor next to Shank was a newspaper, partly soaked in blood, dated three days earlier.

Had Shank been trapped here for three days? Had he wrestled with the thick rope that made up the nets? Did he bleed to death? Did anyone know or hear him call? I got out my cell and started to dial Lippert's number, then shut the phone, got to my feet and walked softly into the other room then out to the corridor and called out, "Billy?"

I turned off the flashlight and said again, softly at first, then louder, "Billy?"

My voice echoed into the darkness, down the row of cabanas, and I thought, out of the blue because I was half crazed, that cabana was the wrong word for this, it was a word that called up sunlight and Latino music and girls in bikinis and drinks with fruit in them and paper parasols on top.

"Billy?"

Pushing myself forward, my feet heavy, I wanted to lie down on the old salt soaked boards of the beach club and drift off. I kept going, down the row, one, two, three doors from the place where Shank lay dead.

There was no noise, no cars, no planes, nothing, just my footsteps and then, suddenly, a tiny noise, creaking, scuttling, near me, next to me, behind the door in front of me.

I yelled out, "Hey, Billy, it's me, it's Artie."

"I'm in here," a voice said. "The door is open."

His voice was normal. The invitation was spoken like an adult would speak it, domesticated, pleasant. The door is open, come on in.

What I felt, first, was hysterical relief: Billy was alive. It was over. The days of looking for him and not finding him, the feeling I'd failed, that one more time I'd used people—Maxine most of all—to get what I needed and then screwed up, that I had looked at the wrong picture or looked at it the wrong way and that I'd find Billy dead at the end of it, it was all over. The tension went; for a second I thought I'd have to sit down. I wasn't much of a crybaby—you'd be surprised how many guys are weepers—but my eyes stung from tears in them. I put my gun away and leaned against the doorjamb with relief. Billy was OK; or, at least, he was alive.

Come on in, Artie, he called again, and I opened the door.

His back was to me. A faint smudge of morning light was coming up outside the window and I set the flashlight, still on, on a table and I could see Billy's fine blond hair was matted and his blue sweater was smeared with blood. On a red plastic chair he sat staring at the TV which was on a shelf that also held a vase of plastic flowers. The electricity was off; the screen was blank. Billy didn't turn around when I came through the door, just sat looking at the set.

"Do you know who hurt Heshey Shank?" I said to the back of Billy's head. "Billy, look at me."

He turned halfway in his chair. I moved towards him and held out my arms and he got up and hugged me. I tried to hold onto him, but he slumped back onto the chair.

"I did it," he said. "I had to." Billy saw me reach for my phone. "Please don't call anyone yet, Artie, please. I just want
55
you.

I put the phone away.

"Did he hurt you?" I sat on the chair next to his. "Did Heshey make you get in his car? Are you hurt anywhere?"

"You mean like the priests, you mean like that, like they put on TV all the time, the priests that stick their hands down the kids' pants? Like that?"

"Like that. Or anything else."

"I would have killed him if he did that," he said. "Right away."

Abruptly he shifted his weight again and looked straight at me; his face seemed formed now, like a little adult. Already you could see how he'd look as a man. The blue eyes were set wide apart in the pale face, like my father's.

It was true: Billy was my nephew; my father had been his grandfather. I noticed the blood on his faded jeans. He wore black sneakers; no socks.

"I'll take you home," I said.

"No."

"Then let me take you somewhere else. It's freezing here. You could come back with me to the city, if you want."

In a dented metal locker, I found some cotton blankets. I wrapped one around Billy and put another over my own shoulders. My cigarettes were in my pocket and I got them out and lit one.

"Can I have one?" Billy said.

"You're too young."

He smiled wide and said, "Come on, Artie, please please please please, give me one. I'll love you forever, I won't tell. Come on, I smoke my mom's when she's out all the time."

I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him and he sat huddled under the blanket, a twelve-year-old man, self-possessed, smoking the cigarette, talking in bursts.

From outside there was only silence, and the cold that seeped in through the broken window and the faint smell of salt, and garbage. There was something else. It was spicy salsa. The blanket had been used for a picnic; in the folds I could feel the crumbs. Chips, I thought; tortilla chips.

"I wanted to fish," Billy said. "I liked it when you took me, but you didn't come all the time. My father didn't take me a lot. I had to see the sheepshead. You remember? They said the sheepshead fish came back to Brooklyn and I never saw one and I had to."

"The fishing really mattered, didn't it?"

He said, "It took my mind off things."

"You met Heshey at the pizza place?"

Billy took a drag on his cigarette and made a face and said, "Yeah. He was always there and he would buy me as many slices as I want and then he would talk blah blah blah about how he's scared, and how he knew the Trade Center was like going to fall before it happened and no one believed him, and he's scared things are coming down from the sky. Creep," Billy said. "He liked me. He just wanted company because he was this retard and I'm like, this is boring, but he has a car. Heshey says his brother knows my grandpa and his brother says it's OK for us to hang out. I didn't believe him first, but he has the car."

"What about friends your own age?"

"They're boring. I try to make friends, I say, let's go on an adventure, a journey, and they say, let's look up some girl's skirt."

"You liked May Luca."

"Fuck you." He tossed the cigarette butt on the floor and crushed it under his heel. "She's dead, OK?"

"You're sorry?"

He looked up. "Sure I'm sorry. Course I am. Jesus fucking Christ, Artie, course I'm sorry. I loved May. I know, OK, we're like little kids, but I loved her and she was nice to me. She gave me her shirt for a present. May didn't buy into this thing I supposedly got, some disease, I hear my mom on the phone talking about it. I know she steals money from my dad for the doctors and she gives it to me, too, to buy me things."

He dug into his jeans and pulled out some matches and a fishing fly; with them, a wad of cash spilled from the pocket.

"Genia gave you the money?"

"She stole it from my father and she gave me some and I took the rest from her purse."

"You were short of cash?"

He laughed. "Always, yeah. Aren't you? I'm not crazy. I'm not sick. They like it better if they think I have something with a name."

"Can I ask you something, Billy?"

"You can ask me anything."

In Russian I said, "Do you speak other languages?"

"Of course," he replied in Russian. "Russian, Italian, even some shitty Spanish I picked up at school."

Like me, he was a mynah bird, a mimic. It ran in the family. He was a little spy, a secret boy. He could join the family business; he had all the talents, the looks, the charm, the softness of speech, the persuasive blue eyes.

"Anyone know about the languages?"

"You must be kidding. Course not. It's my weapon. You know why I learned?"

"Why?"

"I wanted to be like you." He held out his hand and took mine and talked for about an hour, sometimes fluently, sometimes in disjoined sentences.

It started when Heshey Shank invited him to go out fishing and Billy told his grandpa in Florida; they talked almost every day, Billy loved the old man and he was miserable when they sent him away. For what? Billy said. Because he liked little girls? Billy didn't believe it.

"All I wanted was an adventure," Billy said suddenly. "Like in books. My own adventure, a trip, you know?" With his stubby boy's fingers he extracted another cigarette from my pack and lit it.

The trip was set for Saturday. Billy worked it fine. He got Stevie Gervasi across from his own house to invite him for an overnight to the country. He told his mom he was old enough to cross the street alone and she had to let him, he told her, don't baby me, he said. She promised to stay in her room even if she was awake that morning he left.

Early, he called Stevie on his cell—all the kids had their own phones—and said it was off, he wasn't coming, and he watched from the window as Stevie and his dad drove away. Then Billy picked up his bag, jogged down the stairs and left the house. He had to go or he'd miss the timing. He couldn't find his nets, but he had his fishing knife, so it was OK. When Heshey came by in the crappy Honda, Billy was ready.

There was a bonus, he said. A block away he saw Stevie's horrible cat, and he told Heshey to pull over, then raced out of the car, grabbed the cat and slung it in the back seat.

Billy used his fishing knife on the cat and the blood got on his clothes and in the car he changed. He made Heshey drive to Coney Island so he could stuff the blood-soaked clothes under the boardwalk. Later he would string up the cat at the beach club. He also carried extra blood in a jar in his bag. He got it from a butcher store near the pizza joint.

"You put them there so someone would find them?"

Billy shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. I once heard this girl that babysat—I didn't need a babysitter, but my mom said you can't stay alone, blah blah blah—I heard her on the phone saying you could find treasure there, and I thought if someone found the clothes it would be more fun."

"And you put cuts in May's T-shirt, that right? There was a lot of blood for one cat. You cut yourself to confuse everyone, that right? It was a game? Billy?"

Billy didn't answer.

After he hid the clothes, he told Heshey to drive to Breezy Point, where his grandpa Farone had a shack. Then they would go fishing. It started to snow. There was a TV in the shack and after a while, Billy realized people were searching for him. It was fun, he said. It was fun watching, like being at your own funeral and listening to what people said about you.

I said, "I was there. I was at the shack."

"I know. I saw your car. But we were in a different shack by then. I told Heshey he had to do what I wanted or people would say he kidnapped me."

"I would have fixed things," I said.

"I know. But I had to go on this trip. See the sheepshead, stuff like that."

Billy got bored, he said. In the shack in Breezy Point, he found some Tylenol PM in the medicine cabinet, and he knew what it was; he had seen it on TV. He crushed it with a spoon and put it in Heshey's chilli.

"I put tons of it. Heshey was a fat guy."

"And the clock, the drawing? You did it?"

"You liked it?"

"How did you get to the beach club if Heshey was drugged?"

Billy smiled. "I drove. Pretty cool, right? Like you taught me," he said.

"Billy?"

"Yeah, Artie?"

"You think your grandma knew about you going to the shack, you think she knew?"

"Maybe. She knew a lot of stuff. She's a witch, you know? I mean a real one?"

"There aren't any witches, honey."

"I don't know, OK?" He smiled sleepily. "Artie, I'm tired. I want to sleep a while."

I didn't let him sleep. I made him talk. I made Billy tell me how he got Shank to the beach club and half dragged him into the cabana. He told me how Heshey fell asleep and how he got the nets and covered him, and left him. Billy talked and I didn't know how much was true, if he had gone home to the Farones or to the pizza place, but I knew he had cut Heshey Shank.