Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea (5 page)

And the other way around, I told him.

Walter sliced his hand through the air as if chopping off a snake's head. “No way,” he said. “We've looked into it. Not happening.”

I made a crack about Stone's certified team of qualified professionals. Did they know? Did Stone?

He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “What do you think? You can't cut the cheese in his parks without him knowing about it.”

Or score free tickets, I reminded him.

Walter put on his “who me?” routine and pouted. He had cousins coming in from Philly—have mercy.

I reached under the counter and pulled out a stack of complimentary passes. I told him to use them before four or after ten. If they came when there was a crowd, Mike would give me shit.

Walter thumbed through the tickets and said Mike wasn't like that—he was one of us. We all look out for each other, right?

I'm not sure I share the sentiment. Too often, watching someone's back means looking away from something else.

“Why?” I said. “Is there something to see?”

Walter stuffed the tickets in his pants pocket. “Man,” he said, “there's always something to see.”

 

chapter four

careful with tools

Chuck Waters spent so much time on the living room sofa, stretched across its length, bare feet drooping over one end, his head cradled in his hands on the other, that even when he rose to pee or grab something to eat, the cushion dents marked his spot, a crushed echo of his presence. He didn't leave the sofa often. He didn't need to. There was a flat-screen television to watch, a coffee table crowded with necessities: the television remote, his cell phone charger, a Swiss Army knife he idly toyed with as he watched CNN, opening and closing knife blades, scissors, file, saw, magnifying glass
—
tools gleaming with the potential to do something useful.

See?
he seemed to say, although he spoke as infrequently as he moved.
It's all under control. Everything's within reach.
Ethan took a seat on the edge of the coffee table.

Chuck shook his head in disapproval. “Off the table. You know what your mother would say.”

“She's not here.”

“Doesn't matter.” But he didn't put up a fight.

“I was on the boardwalk,” Ethan said.

“Still in one piece?”

A running gag. It had been jogging and wheezing since Chuck had been fired by Bobby Stone late last September. Without his sharp eye and attentive care
—
without the vigilance and dedication he had applied as Stone's lieutenant
—
the boardwalk would crumble into timbers and wash out to sea.

It was only a matter of time.

Ethan looked at the television without really watching it. Earlier in the morning, he had spied on his graffiti to see how people would respond, and he had made a few observations: that the “double take” is entirely an invention of the movies, which no one makes in real life, ever; that if the grand plan is to see responses to your message, writing that message on the inside of bathroom stall doors is probably a bad idea; that in general the overall machinery of the boardwalk moves swiftly. Within twenty-four hours, most of his marks were already gone, either scrubbed clean or painted over. The Pirate's Playground pirate must have posed a special challenge, however; he and his upraised boarding ax had been lifted from his spot, leaving his two rumpled boots in place with screaming-red traffic cones front and back to prevent guests from tripping over them. It was odd. If you're going to carry off the pirate, why not take the boots as well?

His father would find it funny, this thing about the pirate and the boots.

“Left behind?” Mr. Waters asked quietly, as if interrogating himself. “Classic.” He sighed, sat upright, and grabbed a short stack of graham crackers from a box on the table. “That'll give us confidence in the park's maintenance. It sends a message.”

Another running gag: Stone and his messages. His exhortations that employees conduct themselves with care, because everything they did “sent a message.” There were many things about the adult world that confused Ethan, and this “message” thing was one of them. The idea of doing or not doing a thing, not for its own good, but for some kind of message it might send, felt twisted, perverse. To be an adult was to be perpetually shadowed by your own ghost, the one sending messages.

“That's not the only thing,” Ethan said, trying to shoo the ghosts away with words. “There's the Sizzleator.” Ethan took advantage of an open spot at the end of the sofa. An empty space, like a missing voice in a vocal trio, remained between himself and his father. Mr. Waters looked at the television, and Ethan looked at his dad, his scrabbly, unshaven face, the electric shocks of uncombed hair falling over his brow.

“Ah,” Mr. Waters said. “Walter's kingdom. Finally, after all these years, he's worked his way up to the Sizzleator.”

Ethan coughed up a modest laugh. He wanted to be on his father's side, and in a way, it was funny, Walter in charge of something. But in another way, it wasn't. There was something brittle in his father's eyes, small olive pits of bitterness.

“There's graffiti on the front of it,” Ethan said.

“Front of what?”

“Front of the Sizzleator. Just under the counter.”

“Huh.”

“In magic marker. Red. Really bright. Can't miss it.”

“He'll paint over it,” Mr. Waters said, “eventually. But will he use primer first? Probably not. Nope.”

Ethan wanted his father to ask what the graffiti said, and he didn't want to have to ask him if he wanted to know. “From the boardwalk, it's hard to miss.”

Voices from the television only amplified the silence. Ethan picked up the Swiss Army knife from the coffee table and pried open the pen knife blade. He wondered why a blade so squat and stubby was called a “pen knife.”

“It sends a message,” Ethan said.

“What?”

“The graffiti on the Sizzleator. ‘Don't fall.' That's what it says.”

More noise from the television. Two men on parallel screens but in different rooms were arguing alone into their respective cameras.

“Huh.”

“What do you think it means?”

“What means?”

With the edge of the blade perpendicular to his thumb, Ethan tested the blade against his nail. It was something he had seen people do when they wanted to know how sharp a knife was. “Don't fall,” he said.

“Jesus, Ethan,” Chuck said, swiping the knife from Ethan's hands. “It's a tool, not a toy.” He smacked it on the table with a decisive thunk.

“What do you think it means?”

Chuck rolled on his back, facing the ceiling. “If it's supposed to be advice,” he said, “I don't think it's very helpful.”

“You know what I don't get?” Ethan said, speaking toward the television. “Jason hated the ocean, hated the beach. What was he doing out on a jetty?”

“Ethan
—
”

“You ever see him in the water? Or even close? It doesn't make sense.”

“Make sense?” Chuck had slung a forearm over his eyes, as if blocking an intense sun or averting a gory, horror-movie climax. “Of course it doesn't make sense. Jason was smart, but he was still a kid, and kids his age do senseless things. I did. You will. And that night, Jason did too.”

“I just don't see it,” Ethan said.

“That's the problem,” said Chuck. “We don't want to look.”

*   *   *

At seven, Ethan took his daily call from his mother. He could hear sirens and car horns in the background, the roar and drift-off of passing motors. “How's New York?” he asked.

“I'm sitting on a fire escape,” she said. There was something girlish in her voice, as if she were leaning into a circle of girlfriends.
A fire escape! Can you imagine? Just like the movies.
“How are you?”

“Same as yesterday.” When he wasn't on the phone with her, he was buzzing with a million things to say, all of them jostling for attention. Now, he couldn't think of one.

“How is your father?” she asked, the “is” drawn out like the buzz of a ripsaw. “How
is
he?”

Ethan shrugged into the phone. “Okay.”

“Has he found work?”

“Some,” Ethan said. Then, “None. He's waiting for Stone.”

Ethan could practically hear his mother roll her eyes. “Nothing changes,” she said.

“When are you coming home?” She'd left in March. Three months and counting. And Ethan counted.

“Ethan…”

“Just asking.”

“Remember what Dr. Rogers said?”

Lowering his head, Ethan shielded himself from the coming lecture.

“About making assumptions? The vicious cycle? First you make assumptions, then you make poor choices based on those assumptions?” Ethan didn't need to see her to know she was making a circling motion with her hands, pedaling the air on a fire escape in New York City.

“And poor choices lead to stupid actions,” Ethan said.

“Dr. Rogers wouldn't say ‘stupid,' would he?”

“Irresponsible. Irresponsible actions lead to destructive consequences.…”

“Which in turn…?”

“Inspire false assumptions,” said Ethan.

“You're making progress.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Oh, Ethan.”

*   *   *

Any other place, it would have been ridiculous to hope for a job this late in the season. But the Sizzleator was known for high turnover. It was even something of an insider's joke, a badge of Sea Town authenticity, to work at the Sizzleator at least once for a month or two, for as long as you could stand the heat and the grease, the burns on your arms, the stupidity of its management. Even though everyone knew how miserable it was, there was an air of inevitability about the Sizzleator. It had become the place to go when you applied too late for anything better or missed a shift once too often somewhere else and lost what you had. For Ethan, it looked like a passage, a place he could enter as one kind of person then leave as someone different
—
if nothing else, as a veteran of a common experience.

“I don't know that I need anybody,” Walter said, wiping the counter with a dirty dishrag. It was almost eleven o'clock at night, close to closing time.

“Maybe not right now
—
” Ethan said.

“Maybe not you,” said Walter.

A year ago, things would have been very different. But that was a year ago. Before Chuck Waters took the fall for the accident on the roller coaster. Before Jason fell in the ocean.

Ethan pointed to the graffiti under the counter, the only place it had survived on the boardwalk. “You're going to have to take care of this.”

“I know my business.”

“You'll need primer. Two coats.”

“Listen, Little Waters.” Walter leaned across the counter. “This is my place. It may not be much, but it's mine.”

“I know where Stone keeps stuff,” Ethan said. “Paints. Rollers.” He looked up at Walter. “T-shirts. Aprons.”

“I got all the stuff I need.”

You think so?
Ethan thought. He wondered what leverage he might have as Chuck Waters's son. What would he know that Walter would not? Probably that the job others envied, caretaker to a world of amusements, was much more tedious than they would expect, much less about rides, cotton candy, and pinball machines, and more about glowing computer screens, about blank spots on spreadsheets that demanded to be filled. Then it occurred to him: “What about the numbers?” he asked triumphantly.

The double take may have been a work of Hollywood fiction, but the craning of the neck, the turning sideways of the head left and right, the eyes sweeping the landscape for witnesses, that was real. Or at least it was for Walter. Jason had always said Walter was a clown.

“Bullshit,” Walter said. “You can't mess with the spreadsheets. Even your father can't. Not now.”

“We don't have to,” Ethan said. “I can tell you what to put in. And what not to put down.”

“Bullshit,” Walter said again. But much more softly, more a caress than a curse. He looked intently at some point in the middle distance, as if watching a slide show of the possibilities: reports of inventory purchases higher than their true costs, records of sales lower than true revenues. In between these two poles of what really was and what was written down, there gleamed the promise of easy cash just asking to be taken. “You're completely full of shit,” said Walter.

Ethan smiled: he had just gained entry to the Sizzleator.

 

 

June 23, 2013

Stone himself stopped in today and dropped a bomb in our laps: his daughter would now be manager of the Moon Walk Mini Golf. He drew us together in a huddle, Mike alert, Eugene following the speech over the rim of his glasses, and Amy as mute and still as a Buddha, erecting a force field of indifference around her. This daughter was conspicuously absent, and Stone, hands on hips, spoke forcefully in a way that was both blunt and vague. “You're going to see changes,” he said, but for the rest of us, gazing at the ground between our feet, there wasn't anything specific to focus on, just big talk of “change,” “leadership,” and a new satellite in the Stone universe, “flexibility.”

I give Mike credit; when Stone pulled him aside to give him the new marching orders, he had the balls to hold his ground—at least for a while. I was just within earshot, tinkering with the lunar lander at the eighth hole. When it works right, a ramp painted to look like a ladder briefly touches the ground, inviting the putt up and through the lander itself. It moves slowly, but it's still one of the trickier holes.