Open Water (5 page)

The physician on duty took one look at the fresh X-rays of Willis’s wrist and told a nurse to telephone the hospital’s resident orthopedic surgeon. They had to get the specialist out of the swimming pool at the Viking Health Club. Willis had a compound fracture; the earlier break had opened up again and there was a new sawtoothed break two inches higher. The edges of the shattered bones looked feathery against the lighted screen. The nurse injected Willis’s arm with Xylocaine. When the arm was numb, the physician touched Willis’s wrist with his fingertips and then he used his thumbs, applying pressure, massaging the splintered bones into place. “Feel that?” he asked Willis.

Willis said he couldn’t feel it.

“You will later. No question about it.”

Willis could have told the doctor that he wasn’t interested in these rhetorical questions.

The surgeon spent a long time with Willis. The feathered bones were difficult to realign. A few resistant circles
of ink marked Willis’s shoulder although the insect bites had faded. The doctor kept quiet. When the arm was set, a nurse in dreadlocks pulled a new white gauze sock up to his elbow. She layered sheets of polyester fluff over his wrist, snipping the roll with a big scissors. She said, “I wondered you didn’t have 3M fiberglass. Why you have plaster?”

Willis shrugged.

“Three-M fiberglass much lighter. Three-M comes in all kinds of colors. What’s your favorite color?”

“White,” Willis said.

She stared carefully at Willis. “Don’t play with me,” she said. “I’m got these shears. You just feeling mean.”

Willis smiled at the nurse.

“Ted Bundy had a nice smile like that. He use his cast to attract girls. I seen his story on
Unsolved Mysteries.
”

“I thought that case was closed.”

The nurse stood back and crossed her arms. “I’m just saying. It’s a mystery what men do.”

Willis was grinning. A firm, unflinching crescent. Even a forced smile tugged a muscle in his right cheek, creating an irregular fissure like the hips of an apple. The dimple had always allowed him some slack with figures of authority—schoolteachers, dental hygienists, women standing in the express line at the Almacs. Right now he needed a shave. The stubbled pucker in his cheek only accentuated an idea of wayward innocence; it gave him a reckless look. The nurse let it go. She said, “That 3M fiberglass is good. Last fall, we have teen halfbacks come in busted up and we do those arms in their school colors.”

Willis nodded at the nurse.

“It was fun-nee. But for you, the doctor wants plaster again. He needs plaster so he can weight it more on the one side. Son, son,
son
, that wrist is pulverized.”

The nurse talked until the arm was packed and
wrapped. The physician smoothed the wet plaster sheets the way he wanted. “This will have to dry some more before you leave the hospital. You don’t want to knock it when it’s wet,” the physician told Willis. Willis agreed to wait a half hour until the plaster was firmed up.

Willis might have shown up at the Navy Hospital, his file was there, but they would have written another psychological report. Willis didn’t trust the Navy doctors. When he was in Norfolk, they had prescribed a psychotropic drug. He stopped taking the drug when he started having side effects. He couldn’t make enough saliva. He asked Fritz, “If you were a doctor and could make your way, would you go near a Navy base? Would you want to ride some carrier back and forth with a mob of white hats?”

Fritz said, “It wouldn’t be my first choice. Maybe a sub.”

“Let me inform you. Submarines, you have to hot bunk with who-knows-who. Sleep in shifts. You can’t scratch your ass.”

Willis smiled again at the nurse; her dreadlocks showed several little colored balls of lint. Maybe she just hadn’t looked in the mirror. The nurse offered him a pleated cup with two tabs of Tylenol with codeine. He refused it. He wasn’t getting back on that narco merry-go-round. He had business to do and didn’t want to feel woozy.

Fritz had the car loaded with three thousand dollars’ worth of stolen tools from Metric King. One-hundred-forty-eight-piece Master Sets, metric sockets and wrenches, SuperKrome flare-nut wrenches and metric hex-bit sets, whole trays of crowfoots and wobble extensions. Along with the wrench sets, Fritz had foraged a big item—a Porsche Turnkey Diagnostic System, the whole works: computer, display terminal with keyboard, hard-copy printer with roll out,
adapter cables, everything snug in a portable console on casters.

The nurse again showed Willis the pills and rocked on her heels. “It’s numb right now, but that pain will come on.”

Willis shook his head.

“Suit yourself,” the nurse said. “I’m glad I don’t babysit you.” She started to walk away holding the tiny cup.

Willis called her back. “Can you tell me something? About that baby?”

“What baby you mean?”

“My friend Sheila Boyd. Her baby.”

“Why you interested in that? That was sent someplace in Dixie. That went to the Research Triangle. A hospital down there was on a list for one of those.”

“So what happens now?” Willis said. “They dissect it?”

Fritz said, “Let’s get moving. The minute hand—”

The tools were just sitting there in Rennie’s car in the hospital parking lot. Fritz had to get rid of everything that night and he was nervous about waiting around at the hospital. “You had to break your wrist tonight. You forgot our appointment,” Fritz said. He poked Willis’s arm with his pointer to see if it was hardening. Willis’s cast wasn’t drying fast enough. Willis left the emergency room stall and went into the men’s room to heat the cast under the electric blower. Even that didn’t dry the cast, so he left the hospital with Fritz Federico when his arm was still doughy.

Willis had agreed to help Fritz only this once. After his troubles in the Navy, Willis didn’t want to be part of any wise schemes. He wanted a regular job. An old friend of
Rennie had lined something up for Willis. Willis had his hackney license and he took a part-time job driving a box trailer for Narragansett WASTEC, collecting fifty-five-gallon barrels of liquid waste from casting companies, enamelers, and other sites in the jewelry industry. With his injured arm, he was hired only as a substitute driver to ride shotgun and fill out the inventory sheets on a clipboard. Willis was paired up with a fellow named Carl Smith and together they collected plating filters, cyanide sludge, nickel sludge, metal hydroxides, and stripping acids. Wastewater with heavy metals. Every WASTEC truck had a wordy statement running the length of the trailer: “Hazardous Waste Repackaged, Transported, Disposed & Manifested.”

The waste barrels couldn’t go to the Johnston landfill and had to be hauled to a transfer station or to Stablex, where the waste materials were incorporated into concrete slurries. It was harsh work, mostly heavy lifting, which he begged off because of his broken wrist. Instead, he inspected the loads. The barrels weren’t always sealed correctly; they had leaky bungholes and sometimes fumes escaped. The best part of the job was riding with Carl Smith, who didn’t keep his rule book with him. Carl Smith lived on a disabled trawler, the
Tercel
, which he had purchased for a dollar. The ship wasn’t seaworthy but he could keep it moored at Warwick Neck cheaper than paying rent on an apartment. With Carl, everything was a matter of money. One time, Willis went out to the
Tercel
for Brompton cocktails. His party with Carl lasted a whole weekend, but Willis couldn’t tell you what happened in between daybreak and nightfall and from dusk to dawn.

“Carl likes those heroin Slurpees? That’s a bit hard-core,” Fritz said when he heard about it.

“I’ll try anything once,” Willis said.

“You’re not going back for seconds?” Fritz said.

“No. Carl’s not my social equal,” Willis said.

Fritz said, “The day I punch a clock is the day time stands still.”

“There’s no easy money, dickhead. Your freelance jobs end up being twice the work. Remember, I got busted with just a carload of Kools,” Willis told Fritz.

Fritz said, “That’s not too shabby. That was honorable. There’s nothing wrong with a carload of Kools. For starters—”

“At WASTEC, I just show up and I’m on the payroll. I don’t know what they do with the stuff. It’s ‘repackaged, transported, disposed, and manifested.’ I don’t lift a finger.”

“Did you look up that word in the dictionary?”

“What word is that?”

“ ‘Man-infested.’ Sounds like some girls got “
man
infested’ in an alley. Doesn’t it? It has that porn sound—”

“You like to hear things,” Willis said.

“Okay, I like the sound of it.”

“Want to know a funny thing?”

“What funny thing?”

“That lettering peels off the truck. It’s magnetized. I could steal that word for you if you want.”

“You could get me that word off the truck? What would I do with it?”

“That would be your decision. I’m just saying, you think it’s such a hot word, you can have it if you want.”

Willis had known Fritz since middle school days. They were paired up by the school psychologist to receive counseling when the boys suffered coincidental deaths in their immediate families. The same week that Willis was orphaned, Fritz lost his little brother in a freak accident when a sand dune collapsed. After a nor’easter, there was severe
beach erosion and a section of dunes became unstable. Signs were posted. The warnings said:
LIVE SAND
. Fritz was running the top ridge with his brother when the shelf broke loose. Fritz tried to dig his brother out, scooping the sand off, but the hill kept shifting and he wasn’t excavating the exact place. EMS workers had to drag Fritz off the beach, his fingertips bleeding with raw abrasions. Rescue workers found six open graves in the dune where Fritz had searched with his bare hands. These were serious mortal chores left incomplete. The emergency crew had to bring in a backhoe and grade the dune to find the body.

Willis and Fritz were classmates until Fritz spent his senior year in the Training School in Cranston, behind an electric fence, and from there went to New England Technical College for one semester, where he developed a high-toned engineering vocabulary, just enough to irritate Willis.

The Rhode Island coastline, its unruly surf, was not a good place to abandon property and Willis decided to sink Fritz’s stolen items in the freshwater marsh near his stepmother’s house. Fritz said, “Why can’t we leave the items in the back of Ames Discount with the bales of crushed boxes?”

Willis said, “Look, you’re dying to fit into this mode? You want to be in business by yourself? Do I have to tell you? Stolen property can’t be left around with our dabs on it. It has to disappear. Think of it this way. Taking a loss is preferable to leaving a detail. A detail on the loose can show up down the line. An unattended fact can wag its tail months after. We’ve got the Coast Guard sniffing around because of the oil spill.”

“True,” Fritz said.

“Fuck, yes, it’s true. They’re everywhere. They get a team effort hard-on with these oil spills.”

“Agree. They’re forcing us into the interior.”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll keep this local, a site-specific event,” Fritz said.

“Only ants should crawl on it.”

Easton Pond was a big freshwater lagoon behind First Beach, right off Memorial Boulevard. Bailey’s Brook fed the pond, and its water level wasn’t affected by tides. At its deepest point, it was only fifteen feet down. It was a city reservoir and the water department patrolled the area now and then, but it was a better choice than driving over to the Mount Hope Bridge. Their dump-load was too heavy to lift over the railing. They would have looked conspicuous parking at the crest of the bridge where fishermen staked out some favorite spots between the lantern posts. Even in the middle of the night, no matter what time of day, these single-minded men pulled in scup and hake, bony fish that collect around the legs of bridges.

Willis steered the car into the marsh grass and cut the lights. He worried that it might sink in the muck, so he stopped just four feet shy of the lip. It wasn’t close enough to the bank to haul the heavy tools. He tapped the accelerator until the windshield sloped when the front tires touched the mush. It was his stepmother’s big sedan. He took it over from Rennie without assuming official ownership.

Fritz said, “Let me just say this, I didn’t plan on asking for your help.”

“You can’t blow the paper off a straw without my assistance.”

Fritz scratched his face. Little pimples had surfaced midline on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth. His rosacea was coming back, a winter rash, and nerves made it worse. Fritz was high-strung and skinny. There wasn’t much to him. His physique was slight, legs like window poles. He walked on the balls of his feet, as if at any given
moment he might be required to sprint ahead of the group. In cold weather he shivered in lightning-fast tugs and rolls of his shoulders, vibrating like a tuning fork. And always, his face was blank. He never had any expression. He never had anything on his face. Willis envied how that gloom lived
outside
of Fritz instead of in his head. Fritz went right along, wearing it on the outside when Willis had a buildup, a pinging, a roaring noise he couldn’t escape.