Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (17 page)

Diana let me go to check it out. I asked her if she wanted to go instead, assuming she'd want to be there with her father.

She said she'd get the story soon enough. That probably made her the only person in Sea Town not eager to know more.

I wasn't able to get into the park myself—there were cops everywhere and officials with phones to their ears. Despite their efforts, a crowd bulged at the gates, a tumor of heads craning over shoulders, strangers exchanging guesses about what was going on inside. The buzz quieted when the cops cleared a path for a stretcher that rolled past surrounded by grim EMTs, their backs bent over the rails. In a brief gap between them, I saw a bump of white sheet.

“Dead,” someone said behind her hand. There was a sudden intake of air throughout the crowd, as if it had become one startled body drawing itself to its feet. The EMTs rushed the stretcher down the ramp and into a waiting ambulance with restless blinking lights. We watched it pull away. Here and there were sobs for the unknown victim, and then a question: “What happened? What happened?” rolled through the crowd like a beach ball passed over stadium seats.

“Kid fell from the roller coaster,” a man said firmly, an admonishment in its matter-of-factness. “A fucking horror.”

That evening, I lay in bed drifting in and out of thin sleep, tangled in my own white sheet. It was around two in the morning when I heard my father come in downstairs.

He had an I-don't-want-to-talk-about-it look on his face when he saw me standing in the kitchen, but he didn't shoo me out. He opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of orange-grapefruit juice, his favorite. He drew two glasses from the cabinets.

I declined—too much acid too late at night. “What happened?”

Dad stared straight ahead, distracted, watching the film clip in his head. “Kid fell out of the Rock-It Roll-It.”

“Jesus. How?”

“Damned if I know,” he said, but I didn't quite believe him, and I'm not sure he believed himself. There had been problems with the ride that had cost him and his crew some late nights working under arc lamps swarming with moths. I'd been told to keep my distance, and my input was far from welcome, but from what I could make of it, it had something to do with the sensors and the safety bars. It was an elusive thing, a gremlin that would vanish for weeks, then pop up without warning, just enough of a problem to be a pain in the ass, but not enough, at least to Stone's thinking, to justify closing the ride.

“It should've been shut down.” I hadn't meant to say it out loud, but there it was.

“‘Should've' won't help us now,” Dad said, looking into his glass.

“You talk to Stone?” I wondered if Diana was having a similar conversation with her father right now. For some reason, I imagined them in the living room, looking through the plate glass doors toward the ocean, as if the sea would tell them what to do and why.

“Someone's got to take the fall, Jason, and it's not going to be Bobby Stone.”

I asked him who attended the ride.

Dad shrugged and said it was some kid. “He won't be enough. This is too big.”

We avoided each other's eyes. “You think he'll blame you?”

“Already has.”

“Are you…?”

“Not yet. There'll be an investigation. They'll go through the motions.” He swirled the juice in his glass.

None of this made sense to me. His getting the blame. Then this hanging on for what, weeks? Months?

“But if you're the fall guy, why wouldn't he just fire you now?”

That was too blunt, and I thought he might get mad. But he just shook his head pitifully. “You don't understand Stone.”

“You're saying he's basically a good guy?”

“No, I'm saying he needs to see himself as a good guy. We all do.”

“See Stone as good?”

“See ourselves as good. You know what he wants, more than anything in the world?”

“Money?” I asked. “Power?”

“Nah,” he said. I think he was disappointed in me. “Legacy.”

I'll be honest. I don't know if it was the hour or the shock or what, but I was having trouble following him.

He sipped his juice and winced—too much acid, even for my dad. He said Stone has already made his money and has all the power he can manage. “Now it's about what he leaves behind. To his kid. For Diana. It's got to be big, and it's got to be”—he paused, searching for the right word—“intact.”

“What if she doesn't want it?”

“Well,” he said, dashing the rest of the juice into the sink, “wouldn't that be tragic?”

 

chapter twelve

circling the tanks

It always struck Leonard how ratty and squalid the little aquarium was at the end of the Atlantic City island. But why, exactly? Where was the precise rattiness? Was it the missing shingles, like gaps in a street drunk's mouth? The brown patch of scrub and picnic tables by the bay's edge, about as appealing as a scab? The way no one cared to restore the aquarium sign, the paint chips curling like dead leaves from the exposed plywood?

No, he decided, climbing out of his car. He chucked his cigarette onto the gravel. It was the whole sorry idea of the thing, the grinning cynicism behind it. School trip after school trip, he and his classmates, squirming impatiently in the windowless room they called a “Learning Center,” had heard the same story of “the gift,” of how the casino owners gave back to the community by building this (see the earnest learning associate lift her arms, see her make a present of all this to you, you underprivileged little boy and your underprivileged little friends), this aquarium. This place of education and recreation. This humble nod to the great sea surrounding the island and the citizens who lived beside it.

On the wall, there was a large black-and-white photograph of two well-dressed white men shaking hands, smiling into the camera. Gold jewelry leaked from the wrist of one man; disgust escaped from the eyes of the other. In this room, they would shake hands forever.

Shit
—
even in his thoughts, he dragged it out into two syllables, as if he were entertaining a friend sharing space in his head:
shee-itt
.

Because that's what it was, this halfhearted mausoleum of tanks and half-living creatures. A “gift” from men who couldn't give a rat's ass and didn't care who knew it.

And the strangest thing was, he knew she would be here, inside. He knew, not just because of the rumors he had picked up at the park like scattered litter from the ground, not just because it was whispered and wondered and weirded over. He knew, because he'd recognized her silver BMW and had the temerity to park beside it, practically cheek to cheek. He stepped back from the cars, admiring their proximity and their polar oppositeness, the one a luxury item, the other a beloved wreck. He patted the hood of his car
—
good boy.

It took less time than he expected. He found her in a great oval room of tanks, a dark and high-ceilinged room that nonetheless felt like the cramped underside of some tidal pool rock. Glowing water circled the room. Bored fish made circuits inside their tank homes. Besides himself, there was only one other, and although she faced the tanks, he recognized the blade-lean silhouette, the cramped stoop of her shoulders, the long drift of her hair on the back of her neck.

He approached, and when she turned, she spoke first. “Leonard Washington?”

“Washington. Washington Washington. Yup.” His hands dived into his pockets. For all his clever, intuitive, knew-just-what-he-was-doing know-how, he had no idea what to say. He had figured he'd wing it and the words would just come. But they just didn't.

“Yup,” he said again.

Since when had he become a country boy? He feigned interest in a tank, pressing a hand of lean fingers against the glass.

When she brushed the hair away from her face, the gesture made her familiar to him again, like the bite of a forgotten candy flavor from childhood. She wasn't exactly pretty
—
she looked too much like her father to be pretty
—
but, he had to admit, there was
something
there, a baby-bird something a lot of guys would want to scoop up and run home with. He just wasn't one of them.

“I never would've guessed I'd see you here,” she said. “I mean, I don't expect to see anyone I know here.”

He felt vaguely offended and didn't like the feeling. He preferred to be clearly offended, thrown something he could openly swing back against. “I'm just curious,” he said, “about what's under the surface. Of the water, I mean. You?”

“It's just a place to go.”

“As far north as you can go on this island without drowning?”

“Something like that.”

They walked, Leonard marveling that in five years of working on the boardwalk, they hadn't said so much as “boo” to each other, and now it seemed perfectly natural that they would be circling this dark room side by side. He held his hands clasped behind his back. He could practically smell her riffling through
why
s in her head.

“Truth is,” he said, “I came here looking for you.”

The response should have been “why?”
—
and he had girded himself for that with a half-formed answer he'd smooth into shape as he spoke. But she didn't ask why, she asked how
—
how did he know she'd be there?
—
and when she asked it, he looked at the toes of his boots, feeling unexpectedly sorry for her.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “People talk.”

“They do,” Diana said.

“Especially when you're
—
”

“The fairy tale princess?”

“You've heard?” Leonard asked.

“People talk.” She managed a thin smile. It didn't last long. “You want something,” she said. “You might as well get it over with and ask.”

Again, there was that pity thing. Leonard tried pushing it behind his back, a troublesome nephew. “The whole thing with the roller coaster,” he said, trying to find her eyes. “It wasn't my fault, and you know it. I want everyone else to know it.”

“What can I do?” she asked, looking away.

Not honest, Leonard thought, not even close. It was the first check, an elbow in the ribs, against feeling sorry for her.

“Word is that guy who drowned last winter, you knew him. Knew him well.”

No smile, no expression. She seemed to retreat behind her eyes. A toddler hobbled through the doorway, his arms waving for balance, followed by a young woman in a half-crouched run. “You!” she said hungrily, as if he were an escaped chocolate that had managed to make a break from the dessert table. She gathered him up in her arms, and they left as quickly as they had entered, the echo of their laughter hanging in the air.

“What are you talking about?” Diana asked, brushing hair from her face.

“I'm talking about Jason Waters.” He had planned to play miser with his cards, turning them only as he absolutely needed to, but now he spread them open and wide, like a tipsy tourist. “I'm talking Moon Walk, drinking on the beach, riding on the Magic Carpet.”

Faint light from the fish tanks waved lazily over her face. “People tell stories,” she said hopelessly.

“People do,” Leonard said, playing his advantage. “But one person left a diary.”

“Jason?”

Leonard nodded gravely.

“Have you seen it?”

Leonard's hands found their way into his pockets again. “Listen,” he said. “I'm not out to get you. That's not Leonard Washington Washington's style. Not my way of doing things. But…”

“But what?” she asked, a hard knot in her voice.

“But I got to be free of all this shit. This Rock-It Roll-It Coaster shit. You know what I'm saying? Free of it.”

They were in front of an especially dark tank. A formal label on the wall identified the occupant as an electric eel. A far less formal, more urgent message was taped to the tank.
DO NOT DISTURB THE EEL
, it said in handwritten capital letters
—
an angry protest from a would-be defender. Diana drew herself close to the glass, squinting into the murky water. “I don't know what you think I can do about it,” she said.

Leonard stepped up beside her, looking in. “There are only two other people who know about this diary thing,” he said. “But that can change.” He shielded his brow with the cup of his hand and looked closer, scrutinizing the water for life. Finally he saw movement, a long supple s-curve. A satin banner of dorsal fin teased the water in waves that pulsed back and forth over the eel's spine. “It's supposed to be electric,” Leonard said. “Does it ever light up?”

“Tap the glass,” Diana said.

“What?”

“Come on,” she said, meeting his eyes. “There's no one else here.”

Leonard made a tentative fist, lifting it toward the tank. “I don't think we're supposed to do that.”

“I won't tell. Go ahead. Tap it.”

Leonard rapped his knuckles on the glass. With a speed that seemed impossible just a moment before when the eel appeared more to drift than to swim, an open mouth whipped toward the sound; a shock of light exposed a halo of hostile, pin-sharp teeth and two ruby eyes, like flares, blazing above them.

“Jesus,” Leonard said, jumping back from the tank.