Open Water (13 page)

Rennie was squatting down, palpating the dog’s abdomen until it yelped.

“Which vet should I go to?” Holly said.

“I hope you’re ready to shell out your own cash.”

“Oh, I didn’t think of
that.
Don’t you think she’ll pay for it? It’s her children’s pet.”

“Nicole, pay for it? In a coon’s ass.” Rennie told Holly that Nicole had a way of assuming that events occurred beyond her perimeter of responsibility. “She picked all my pole beans one time and said that they
told
her to pick them. The beans sent messages to her. She was just giving me a hard time. She stole those beans for dinner. She’s a
con artist. Then, one time she hung out her clothes right before a nor’easter. Which took a lot of brains. The wind tugged them off the line, they blew all over the place and she wouldn’t retrieve them. All over the trees and bushes. Brand-new panties. Left there for days. Willis wasn’t going to collect them. So, after a while, I took them for myself. They
asked
me to pick them.”

“You took her underwear?”

“Ladies Jockeys. Nice ones.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You make her sound nasty. Nicole seemed all right this morning. Normal. She fixed my window.”

“Did that window need to be fixed?”

“What?”

“Was the window broken?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.” Holly started to get angry. Why did this woman want to confuse her?

“If your window was broken, you would have noticed it. It’s raw. You would have felt a draft.”

“You mean she didn’t have to fix my window?”

“She was probably just snooping.”

Holly went into her house and came back with a laundry basket. She rolled the dog into the basket and put it in her own car. The children ran for their coats and she settled them in the backseat on opposite sides of their puppy. “Don’t put your hands near her face,” she warned them. “She’s going to snap.”

Rennie went into her house and came out wearing her car coat. She sat in the front seat next to Holly. “I’ll pay for the dog today, tonight we gang up on Nicole to get the cash.”

“What if the dog needs to be put to sleep?” Holly asked.

“We’ll see about that.”

“We don’t have permission from Nicole. The doctor will need the owner’s permission, won’t he?”

“No one is putting anything to sleep. Watch what you say. The walls have ears.”

The dog was euthanized. After the procedure, they brought the dog home in the same laundry basket. The dog’s weight felt as if it had doubled when Holly lifted it out of her car. That must be what they call “dead weight,” Holly was thinking. Rennie said she would ask Willis to dig a hole. They would bury the puppy and put a marker where the kids could plant something later on, after the last frost. Holly left the dog in the basket on Rennie’s porch.

Rennie said, “You like seafood?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m going down to my cable and pick some mussels for lunch. You want some lunch?”

“You’re going where?”

“There’s an old mooring cable on the beach. I haven’t collected mussels for quite a while; it should be a good harvest.
Fruits de mer.
”

Rennie waited for Holly to decide.

Holly’s stomach had calmed down but her headache was holding on. She didn’t know if she should chance it, mussels of all things, but she liked Rennie’s company. “I guess I do need to get some lunch,” Holly said.

The tide was moving in and Rennie gave Holly an extra pair of rubber waders. The ridiculous thigh-high boots must have belonged to Willis and she felt strange wearing his boots into the cold sea. The two women waded along the cable until they were in past their knees in the icy water. Rennie’s crop of mussels was clinging in irregular hunks
along the rusted steel braid which stretched in a taut line from the rocky shore out to the depths somewhere. Rennie plucked the shellfish free and cut any extra weed from them before dropping them in her metal scallop basket.

“I can’t eat much of these myself,” Rennie told Holly. “My plumbing is on the blink half the time.”

“But you look great,” Holly said. “No one would ever assume—”

“That I’m a medical throwaway? Well, it’s true. They can get you to a point and then the ball’s back in your own court.”

Rennie’s flat assessment of her situation encouraged Holly’s protests, but Rennie was correct. Holly had seen it happen to her father. She couldn’t tell Rennie what to expect, but she wanted to tell Rennie that her father’s soul
wasn’t
extinguished. His soul was like a great wrought-iron bell that shook Holly with unbearable vibrations, a relentless ringing imperceptible to others. If she hiked alone on the beach it was inviting her father’s scrutiny. She “took a walk” with her father every time she went out the door, and he followed her back inside. Since his death, her private hours had become strangely “unprivate.” She felt her father’s presence, not as a spirit or a ghost; it was more like a wounded “eye” out of nowhere. She wanted to ask Rennie if she planned to haunt Willis like her own father stalked her, but of course she couldn’t say that. She must have looked peculiar because Rennie was watching her. Rennie said, “I sure apologize for the other day. People do crazy things sometimes.”

“That’s all right,” Holly said.

Rennie said, “Sometimes people go too far.”

Holly thought she might be referring to Jensen’s bed. Rennie was dredging it up just to let Holly know it didn’t matter to her if Holly had done such a horrible thing or not.

Holly stood in the clear brine and looked the other woman in the eyes. Holly said, “It must be difficult having two sons who feel so opposite.”

“It’s like the blue and the grey. Two brothers meet on the battlefield; their mother doesn’t know which one will come back to her kitchen hearth. She might have a favorite, you know.”

Holly said, “Is Willis your favorite?”

“A mother doesn’t admit who it is.”

“Is Willis rebel or Union?”

“I don’t know yet. How can I know which one is on the losing side until the war is done?”

Rennie shook the basket and looked at their haul. It was about four pounds of huge, silvery-black teardrops. “This is plenty, unless Willis shows up.”

Holly looked across the water at the house. The cuffs of the cold rubber waders rose up the insides of her thighs and she didn’t want to be in them anymore.

“He used to eat this much by himself, but lately he’s fussy. I think he looks skinny, what do you think?”

“How would I know?”

They walked back along the beach. Rennie stooped over something in the sand. A big thirty-pound hunk of seal meat had washed ashore, its gorgeous dappled hide intact.

“Struck by a propeller,” Rennie said.

“Maybe it’s a shark’s leftovers.”

“No, I’ve seen this before. A trawler hit it. Poor thing.”

In Rennie’s kitchen, they stood at the double sink. Holly trimmed the beards off the mussels with a paring knife and Rennie scrubbed the remaining weed from the shells. Rennie steamed the shellfish and Holly ate half of what was set before her. She was late for her shift at Saint George’s where she had to start the dinner.

F
ritz was working for Gene Showalter in Fall River; he was hired to pick up some containers. He told Willis that for two bills they would drive into the general aviation hanger at Green Airport in Warwick, pick up the what-have-you, and they’d drive it back to Fall River.

Willis told Fritz, “Easton Pond was my last foray under the slimy petticoats of your goons in Newport or Fall River, whoever they are.”

“This guy is unique,” Fritz said.

“Save the introductions. I don’t want to meet your friends of distinction.”

Fritz said, “This is all velvet. It’s plush.”

Willis agreed to go along. He told Fritz, “For one, I can deliver the Salve Regina ball and chain at her sister’s.” Willis was glad for any excuse to get rid of Debbie Cole, the nursing student. The afternoon on the Cliff Walk was just a prelude. A few days after their initial streetfight, Willis went into Douglas Drugs, where Debbie worked weekends. She was repricing a row of analgesics and he waited around for ten minutes until she was ready. She came right along, without asking questions. It was as if he was picking up a prescription. It took ten minutes to get her outside,
twenty more and the whole thing was a complete story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Willis took her around with him every night, but she was wearing thin. Debbie collected horoscopes, little tubes of paper she purchased at convenience stores. These tiny scrolls irritated Willis when she pulled them open and started reading out loud the daily warnings.

Before meeting Fritz, Willis took Debbie to play pool at Narragansett Tavern. It impressed her when the weekenders ogled at Willis’s success despite his injury. He asked her to chalk his cue, which she did with cute ceremony, then he propped the stick against his plaster cuff and sighted. He built up the drama. He poked at the cue ball and it clacked where he’d aimed it. He took all the solids but he had trouble with the eight ball. He scratched. It was anticlimactic and the girl complained. They drank pitchers and came back to her tight coed apartment on Fenner Avenue where they ate tortilla chips in bed. The cornmeal grit was making the bed sandy and the girl peeled off the sheet, shook it on the floor, then tucked it under the mattress again.

When the girl was napping, snoring in little nasal sips, Willis decided he was finished with her. After a long ordeal of sex, his knees fluttered as if a half-dozen moths turned back and forth behind the patella in a strange postcoital metamorphosis. It wasn’t the familiar honey-dripping landscape of afterglow, it was something new, an unpleasant haze. For the last few weeks, his routine sex life flickered on and off, depending on his program of morphine. On one level he could complete the task, but an abyss was opening up between his expertise and his ability to engender and employ it. Willis went into the kitchen and sat down at the tiny dinette, tipping the chair back on two chrome legs, thinking it over.

He walked around the apartment looking for a drinking glass that didn’t have butts and ashes. A bowl of leftover guacamole was turning brown where it sat at the center of the table. In Norfolk, Willis had watched a triple-X videotape, a pretty nice one until the last thirty seconds. In these last moments, the actress turned her back to the camera, bent over to touch her toes, wrapping the palms of her hands around her Achilles tendons, and there it was: green crud in her slit. Guacamole smeared into the vulva of a porn queen has its lasting effect. She was thumbing her nose at her own public, and Willis took account of it.

Willis refused to eat a tortilla chip slathered with the guacamole paste. When Willis explained the video to Debbie, she listened in disbelief. “You’re kidding. That dip has lemon in it. Shit. That lemon would sting, wouldn’t it?”

Willis poked around the kitchen, throwing the garbage in a bin. He wrapped the violet-stained avocado skins in a newspaper. It was an old issue of the
Newport Daily News.
He read the brief obituary for his friend’s stillborn baby. He thought of Sheila Boyd, the new mother. He wondered why someone’s family misfortune became his secret burden. Willis felt its indirect weight upon him. He recognized his panic systems gearing up. His panic moved into place the way harpies collect on the cornerstones of buildings. Like the jagged, winged edges of a puzzle, in an instant the beast was fully assembled. Willis had to concentrate on his breathing. Breathing, without direct monitoring, became the central player in these attacks. To help Willis avoid hyperventilation, a Navy therapist had drawn a diagram for Willis; it was a simple box.

The inch of print about the baby triggered his symptoms. He was tipped way over the point of comfort. Regardless of faith, regardless of good deeds or blind devotion, every routine minute was a notch on a roulette wheel. Because of this giant-size wheel, Willis kept honed and wiry; he performed his daily tasks amidst a meteor shower of little chances and threats.