Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (8 page)

Diana's hair tends to cross her face when she leans over the register to ring up customers. It was crossing her face now. We couldn't hear what she was saying, but Stone came in loud and clear—his is the one voice that can be heard above all others on the boardwalk, no matter how crowded it is.

The word “tickets” came up, and Mike gave me an I-told-you-so expression. I pulled out a screwdriver and moved in closer to the office, pretending to fuss with a light fixture tucked about knee-high in the hedges. Frankly, it gave me a way to get away from Mike too. He was getting on my nerves.

“Where'd they go?” Stone asked. “How can you be short by almost forty tickets and not know about it?”

I could just barely hear her. “I don't know,” she said. “I screwed up the numbers.”

“You screwed up the numbers?” He paused, challenging her to fill in the silence. “This isn't about math. This is about staff. Your people.”

“I don't think so.”

Stone lowered his voice—just a little. “Diana, they're testing you. Don't you see that?”

“Everything's fine,” she said. “I just lost count of a few tickets.”

“You didn't lose count of anything.”

“I'll make up for it. Out of my own pay.”

Whatever self-control Stone had, he lost it. His hand came down hard on the countertop, rattling a cup of pencil stubs. “How can anyone respect you if you don't respect yourself?” It was too harsh, even by his own standards. His voice softened. “You can do this,” he said. “I know it's in you.” When she didn't respond, he made a sigh that sounded familiar—I had heard it often enough from my own father. Stone turned and left.

Mike sidled up next to me. “You hear that?” he whispered.

“That's Stone,” I said.

“Not him, Diana. Listen.” He held up his hand, crossing-guard style. “She's crying,” he said gleefully.

It was true. Though her hair shielded much of her face, her shoulders were shaking and her breath jerked irregularly. She probably was crying.

“Boo hoo,” Mike said.

I drove my screwdriver into the ground. I told him to fuck off. Didn't he have any real work to do?

 

chapter six

a christmas present

The Christmas tree lay on its side at the foot of the basement stairs as if it had tripped on the way down and then died there from neglect. In fact, it hadn't budged since the day in February when, in an unusual display of emotion, Chuck Waters had bear-hugged the tree and lifted it, stand and all, without regard for the string of lights that was still plugged into the wall or the ornaments that scattered around his feet as he carried it to the basement door and heaved it angel first into the gloom below.

“There,” he had said, presumably to Ethan's mother, although she had gone upstairs a half hour before, “the tree's down. Happy?”

Now it was June, the edge of the first summer since Jason's death, and Ethan stood at the top of the basement staircase, peering into the darkness, burning with indignation. He hadn't thrown the tree down, but he was going to pick it up. His father had not been pleased when he learned that Ethan had found a job at the Sizzleator, found it without asking, without discussing it, without drawing upon Chuck Waters's knowledge of, and contacts on, the boardwalk. “You just walked up and asked for a job, just like that?” Chuck had asked.

“Yeah,” Ethan had said. “More or less.”

“The rules have changed,” Chuck said. “At least out there.” That was when he got the idea that the basement really needed to be straightened up and Ethan would be the right man to do it.

“Why now?” Ethan had asked his mother during their daily call. He thought she would back him up, have a few words with his father, insist on being fair.

But all she said was, “It's long overdue.”

Finally, something they can agree on, Ethan thought bitterly. What was it they had been fighting about before she went upstairs? Before his father got up from the kitchen table and crossed the television without so much as a glance at Ethan? Before he strode to the Christmas tree and, after a brief pause eyeball-to-eyeball with a crystal Santa, thrust his arms through the branches, strangled the trunk, and lifted the tree from the floor?

There were times, Ethan understood, when it was best not to ask questions; they coincided with the times he most wanted to ask them. His father's throwing the tree down the stairs was one of them.

This he did remember: that it was long after Christmas, even after Valentine's Day
—
there were already Easter decorations in the stores. Now, standing at the door to the basement looking down, fighting back questions about the point of all this and its injustice
—
questions that would only make his work harder and longer
—
Ethan allowed his eyes to adjust. Downstairs, one bare bulb fought a losing battle against the darkness surrounding it. For reasons Ethan couldn't begin to fathom, his father refused to put anything greater than forty watts in the light socket. He drew a deep breath through his nose, testing the cool air, the musty smell of mildewed tent canvas, rusting iron tools, and abandoned seedbeds.

Straddling the Christmas tree, Ethan began unwinding the light strings, wrapping them around his palm and elbow the way he had seen his father's crew wind up extension cords at Happy World. He set the coils aside and retrieved empty boxes for the ornaments. Ethan tucked the ones that had survived the fall carefully into their boxes. After removing all the ornaments he could see, he rolled the tree, like a patient in a hospital bed, to reach the ones underneath. Shards of broken ornaments glittered on the rough basement floor, as if the tree had bled broken glass.

Ethan disassembled the tree, folding the limbs against the trunk, straitjacketing the wiry arms of coarse plastic needles. Before, this had been a joint effort of “the boys,” and doing it together had blunted the melancholy of the season's end, the three of them fussing and joking over what belonged where, who had which box, and how on earth everything would fit back into the boxes. Jason was the most methodical of the three and had an almost preternatural gift for packing each box like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, the newspaper-wrapped ornaments nestled together without gaps. Meticulous work Mr. Waters greatly admired.

When they carried the boxes downstairs, Mr. Waters would get distracted by all the reminders of unfinished business that had found their way downstairs: the blender he had planned to fix, the flower boxes he was going to paint and install under the street-facing windows. Ethan, who rarely went into the basement, treated it as an opportunity to explore the unfamiliar. Poking through boxes and bench tools, he caught hell from both his father and brother, who would bark him away from the boiler valves and demand that he put down the reciprocating saw he held aloft like a madman chasing teens through the woods.

But being in the basement by himself did not give Ethan a welcome sense of freedom. Instead, he felt a last-man-standing kind of anxiety, a lonely apprehension that there would be no one remaining above when he had completed his work below. He tried to shake off the feeling and concentrate on the tree, placing each part in the tall, narrow box that, when his father carried it upstairs, had always formally announced the beginning of the Christmas season in the Waters home.

In keeping with his father's instructions, Ethan stacked the ornament boxes in the far corner of the basement opposite the oil tank; they stood precariously, like an old man with a bit of a stoop. He steadied the large Christmas tree box on an overturned milk crate that would keep the tree above water should the basement flood. It never had, but neighbors on either side of the Waterses had gotten wet basements after unusually rainy springs. Dad had seen the pump hoses rolled out of their basement windows and then made it a rule to put anything important at least a foot above the basement floor. “Planning ahead,” he had said, “is what saves you in a disaster.”

The coils of lights came next. “On the emergency shelves,” his father had said. On the east side of the basement, he had knocked together some scrap lumber from work to build a wide set of shelves that held items the family might need in an emergency
—
a hurricane, a winter storm, or an overloaded electric grid that had simply collapsed from exhaustion. Many of the provisions made sense
—
canned soups and raviolis, bottled water, a first-aid kit, a twelve-pack of toilet paper
—
but others seemed odd: What would they do with the bottle of hair gel on the shelf? Why the cans of frosting or the disposable razors? And the baseball bat
—
the last line of defense against unnamed what, zombies? Ethan picked it up, testing its heft. He made a few low, loose swings, semaphoring the bat by his knees. He pictured rising waters that might stream by his ankles then rise up his legs, the bat useless in his hands. He wondered, would it float? If Jason had found a bat like this bobbing in the water, would it have been something to cling to? Or just another thing he'd have brought down with him?

After clearing the tree, Ethan scanned the floor for strays. Broken ornaments had left a sheen of silver that twinkled as Ethan moved around the basement searching for survivors. There were fragments everywhere, under the shelves, against the staircase footings, even under the oil tank.

With a few minutes of stooping and pecking, Ethan
—
an anti-Santa
—
had gathered most of the largest pieces into a white trash bag. Just as he was about to twist up his bag, he saw a glint under the oil tank. Reluctantly, he lay on his stomach and looked underneath. A plastic angel was just within reach, and he grabbed it, but that wasn't what gleamed. He probed farther, touching a flat edge he thought must be the wall. But it couldn't be; it had an edge, a corner, beyond which a silver ornament shaped like a teardrop remained outside Ethan's grasp, even when he shifted himself parallel to the tank to shoulder under it. To Ethan's surprise, there was much more space behind the tank than it appeared.

He got to his feet, brushed the dirt from his shirt, and approached the tank by its narrow side; a stack of boxes concealed the gap. He disassembled the stack from the top, careful not to trigger a cascade tumbling down on himself. Pulling aside the top box, the head, exposed nothing but black air. But after the second box, Ethan saw a chrome clamp light, like a photographer's flood lamp, clipped to the rafters. Strange. With greater curiosity, he removed the third box and faced a steel folding chair. The last box on the floor he brushed aside with his foot.

Ethan's heart raced, as if he had just stumbled upon the evidence of an interrogation meant to remain secret. It was like the set to a scene that looped through his head (“You'll never make me talk.” “Oh, we'll make you talk, all right!”), but it was real and just feet in front of him. Although he knew there was no one nearby, Ethan turned around, listening for footsteps, movement, the hard breathing of someone watching intently. The kitchen refrigerator hummed overhead. An acoustic guitar whispered from a neighbor's radio. Again, the last-man feeling came over him
—
everyone above had been sucked into the sky by aliens or angels. Or they might as well have been.

Ethan reached for the clamp light, feeling for the switch. He turned it on, then blinked in the sudden brightness. The light revealed a cord that ran through the floor joists toward an outlet elsewhere in the basement.
Why go to the trouble?
Ethan wondered. He kneeled on the chair and looked behind it. On the floor was a low, black trunk bandaged with peeling bumper stickers. Scarred metal knuckles reinforced the corners; on one broad side of the trunk, a leather strap hung loosely, like a large dog's panting tongue.

Ethan gripped the chair back, bracing himself against a weightless feeling threatening to push him over. The trunk had to be Jason's. The idea was less a thought than a sudden gut conviction. Reason followed the feeling in a progress as calm and measured as a principal's footsteps. His mother hated the basement
—
she said it gave her “the willies” and refused to enter it. If she needed something from downstairs, she always sent Jason to get it. For his father, the oil tank space would've been both cramped and unnecessary
—
the basement was already his; he wouldn't need a private fortress within it.

No, this was the kind of place a boy might retreat to. And in the trunk? Whatever Jason wanted to keep to himself. Like what? Dope? Love poems? Dirty magazines? Plans for world conquest? Ethan folded the chair, which screeched as it collapsed on itself, and leaned it against the wall.

There was just enough room to swing the trunk lid open. On top, he found a box of Cheez-It crackers (against his better judgment he nibbled one and spat it out: stale) and an opaque plastic pouch that looked promising
—
rare coins, knives, pills?
—
but only held pens, pencils, a draftsman's compass, and a thick pink eraser. Beneath these were stacks of comic books and a few magazines: sequences of Green Lantern and Spider-Man, a two-year-old
Scientific American
and a couple of
Popular Mechanics
. Farther down, Ethan found some papers, school papers, exams crawling with elaborate equations and figures. Teacher praise, of the kind Ethan rarely saw himself, shouted in red pencil. “You show much promise,” said one note, canted diagonally on the margins of the page. This, Ethan marveled, Jason found not just worthy of keeping, but of hiding. Isn't that what makes treasure treasure? Burying it?