Open Water (4 page)

They waited for the salesperson to finish a transaction. Willis told the nurse, “The question is—just what does that sign really mean?”

“That sign there?” she said. “It says
SALE
.”

“What does it mean?” Willis said.

She laughed, two impatient coed snorts. “It means they’re going to cost less money.”

“But from what height does the price make its descent?”

“Its what?”

“It’s all relative,” he told her.

She moved across the room to look at a fringed handbag; she fingered the leather strings. “How about Friday night? Doing anything?”

He knew that was coming. He ignored her invitation
and told the salesman, “Ten and a half, maybe eleven.”

She stood in front of Willis. “Well, what about Friday?”

Willis said, “That’s the end of the week. The end of the week isn’t good.”

The man came back with the boots. Willis worked his left foot into the high leather cuff, then tugged the other one on with his good hand. He stood up and walked a wide circle around the girl. He stopped before a knee-high mirror and studied his feet.

The girl said, “They’re kind of pointy, aren’t they?”

“They’re good.”

“What about your toes?” she said.

“Perfect,” Willis told the salesman. “These on sale?”

“Not that exact pair.”

“Shit,” Willis told the girl. “See what I’m saying. That sign doesn’t have the fine print.”

“Now wait a minute,” the salesman said. “We have these same boots. Smoke-damaged. In our cellar showroom.”

“These boots here?”

“Smoke-damaged. Fifty percent off. You rub the smoke off with a chamois.”

Willis sat down and removed the expensive boots. He had to retrieve one sock from inside the tight leather toe. He nested the gleaming footwear in a big box and picked up his old boots.

The salesman said, “Hold on, I’m telling you. These smoke-damaged items are a steal. They’re the same boots except for a little stink; it works its way out. It was a storage trailer fire. It smoldered for days just like a backyard smoker, but everyone buys these smoke-affected boots. We sold a pair to Kevin McHale. You know McHale? Number 32? See these ones I have on? These were smoke-damaged.”

Willis looked at the man’s glossy boots. They had square toes with a strap and buckle around the ankle and were not to his liking.

The salesman pointed to a narrow hallway running between stacks of shoe boxes. “Go right through to the back and down those stairs. Jimmy’s working down there today.”

Willis noted that as soon as he was pegged for the second-class inventory he was put on a first-name basis with the staff.

“I’m not going in the basement,” the girl told Willis.

“Why the hell not?” Willis said.

“Maybe it’s got rats, right on the harbor like this.”

“It’s fine,” the salesman said. “Go see. Our irregular merchandise is hardly any different from what’s up here.”

Willis went down the narrow staircase. The old seams in the foundation walls were mortared in odd patches and the light was weak. They walked into a wide, carpeted room. The Salve Regina nurse shuffled close behind him, sinking her finger in the waistband of his jeans. He nudged her loose. The cellar smelled remarkably like the aftermath of a major firefighting event. Boxes of smoke-damaged leather were rank in the moist, sea-level showplace. The odor was both coal tar and pork rinds. He sat down again and waited for the man named Jimmy to come back with the style he wanted. He tried on the smoke-damaged boots. It was the same fit. The heels were high and steady, but the leather was marred with dark pewter whorls. He rubbed the cuff of his jacket over the cloudy toe, but it didn’t shine up.

“These are top of the line. Look at that stitching,” Jimmy said.

Willis saw that the golden sewing looked muddy in some places. “I just take my chances the smoke comes off?”

“Look. It’s your decision. A little squirt of Windex. It cleans right off.”

The tinged boots were comfortable. Willis paid half price for the boots and they went up the stairs and out to the street. The girl wanted to set up their next meeting. Her Timex had a digital calendar and she kept turning her wrist to look at the date. “It means something to me,” she said.

He told her, “You wear Speedo underpants? Let’s slow down a little bit.”

“Well?” she said.

“Take it easy. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

She sank her fist into his flannel pocket and they walked up Memorial Boulevard.

The girl had become moody. She wasn’t having any fun. He walked her down to the water where conservationists, beachcombers, kids getting out of their schoolwork were scrubbing landmark boulders with grease-absorbing towels. A tanker had spilled grade-two heating oil, leaving deposits on First Beach. Volunteers organized into cleanup groups to patrol the affected shoreline. Willis watched Audubon professionals chase black ducks across the flats until the birds spooked and lifted off. These ducks, Willis knew, were black on their own account, but Willis kept out of it. The sea mist rolled in with the odor of a basement furnace, its oily grates and laden filters.

Willis studied the shoreline. On the facing cliff, an off-kilter flagpole fronted the house where he lived with his stepmother. Rennie sometimes ran semiotic greeting cards up the pole, burlap sacks painted with the names of her old associates coming in on a diminishing fleet of stern draggers and side trawlers.

He led the girl away from the beach when there were
only a few people still on the flats scrubbing rocks. The cars on Memorial Boulevard had come to a complete stop. The Salve Regina girl had started to pick a fight with Willis. She stood in the middle of the traffic, tugging Willis by his hair. People looked surprised to see a nursing student in her white tights and translucent nylon uniform beneath her three-quarter coat. Willis had given her the brush-off without much explanation and he was riding out her tantrum. Drivers tried not to gawk at the couple, shifting to look at the endangered beach. Circles of tainted kelp still littered the sand like shiny greased saw wheels.

The girl was jerking his taped wrist and kicking the stiff shank of his new boot. He pulled his arm free, then steadied her face to administer two abrupt kisses, bossy pecks. It looked like a science book display of nurturing dominance in a subset of the primate family. Again, the girl took a shag of his hair. His hair had been cropped short in the Navy but it was growing out in a wild black halo. She ripped a tight clump of it. The roots came out whole, rounded, like tiny white pupae.

He butted her face.

She circled her fingertips over her cheekbone where a little egg was rising. Willis touched her cheek, inspecting her sore spot. He said, “Miss, that’s a shiner in the works.”

“Willis Pratt, are you serious? A black eye?”

“I regret it,” he said.

“Wait a minute. What did you call me? Did you forget my name?”

He said, “I was talking about your eye.”

“Fuck that. What’s my name?”

“I didn’t forget.”

“Say it,” she said.

“Look. If ‘Miss’ is too formal for you—” He shoved her
through the traffic and back onto the sidewalk, away from the onlookers. She shrieked and ran ahead of Willis. He was right behind her, stepping on the heels of her cream-colored shoes. When she turned to face him, she was standing in her stocking feet. She was a tiny girl, and in her tights she looked like a pixie who had lost all her magical abilities. She was helpless against her own bad temper until she grabbed a rock from the gutter, a chunk of pink curbstone. She crashed it down on Willis Pratt’s arm.

His plaster cast released a small puff of dust.

“Apologize for that,” Willis said.

She laughed with pleasure. She jabbed the sharp rock at Willis, weaving her arm back and forth in a cobra’s zigzag. Plaster chalk sifted over his jeans. She went for his face, but he lifted his heavy white arm across his eyes. She hammered the cast with metered accuracy until the bone-colored fabric ripped open. The plaster was pulverized, revealing the mesh wrappings, the inner fluff, and a tattered gauze sock.

A swell of white powder drifted in the still air.

She dropped the rock at her feet. Her jaw fell open, then she shut her mouth.

Willis waited for the pain to level off, testing its edge and duration. His arm was blazing with ripped nerves. He recognized a possible setback in his recuperation. Perhaps it was a major setback. His mending fracture felt freshly skewed. Without his trying, a twenty-milligram morphine sulfite suppository surfaced as a vision. Rennie’s heavenly wax nugget: one end was tapered, the other end had an indentation for his fingertip. He acknowledged the pharmaceutical ingenuity behind the notch for his index finger.

The girl went back to where her shoes had come off. She toed them over and slipped them on. She went around a parked car and waited on the other side.

He walked over to her. “Settle down,” he said.

She didn’t say anything. Her lips made a two-inch crease.

“Listen to yourself,” he said.

She crossed her arms and lifted her chin, then dropped her face and squinted at him.

“Do you hear what you’re saying?” he told her.

“I didn’t say shit.”

“The language I’m hearing. From a nurse,” Willis said. The tremolo in his voice was unrehearsed and added authenticity to his reprisals. The nursing student looked suddenly dazed, like a sparrow after it hits a plate-glass window. She was ashamed of her assault and the wounds she had delivered.

Willis reached into one of the parked cars, touching the radio knobs with his left hand.

“From Pilgrims Landing, it’s WPLM. ‘Sophisticated Swing.’ ”

He didn’t have a key for the ignition. The radio was dead.

“Musical methadone for your nostalgia addiction,” he said. Willis learned every kind of radio patter; he had an automatic memory for whatever came across the air waves. Yet his words were broken off. Pain was causing his lungs to tighten in a mock asthmatic reaction.

“It’s me, honey, your dean of déjà vu,” he told her. He started to sing. He was singing ragged phrases.

“Make the world go away. Get it off my shoul-ders. Get it OFF MY SHOUL-DERS.”

A mist of sweat sparkled along his eyebrows. His face was losing color, chalk tones drifted higher. He looked pale as a china Madonna.

“ ‘Another Melancholy Midnight’ with WPLM,” Willis said. His heart wasn’t in it exactly and she could tell. She
wasn’t smart enough to have known it all along. She watched him, but her anger was diminished. She arranged her tangled hair, pulling it free from her jacket hood. This girl had wanted to fight and she handed it right back. Now she was finished for the night. She closed her icy fists and pulled them inside the cuffs of her jacket. “Are you through?” she said.

Two neighborhood women were walking back from the beach cleanup. He would have opened it up to conversation, invited dialogue, but the women ignored him.

Willis called after them, “Hey, do-gooders. Ecology babes—”

The Salve Regina student saw her chance. She trotted off and tagged up with the other women. Together they walked away from Willis.

“Come on, Debbie. Debbie Cole—” he called after the nursing student. The fact that he said the girl’s true name forgave something in his behavior, but the Salve Regina student didn’t turn around.

“Hey,
girls
,” Willis called after them. “
Girls
, wait up. Just a minute—
GIRLS
.”

He watched the women until they became blotty in the circles of the halogen streetlamps. The surf at First Beach scrolled across the pebble sheet in rich, percussive phrasings. Willis weaved on his feet, as if the audile suction of the waves was, and had been for years, a great source of fatigue. The blood swam away from his face. Tiny silver smelts thrashed behind his eyes. The pain in his arm had migrated into his balance nerves and he lost his legs.

F
ritz Federico accompanied Willis to the emergency room at Newport Hospital. Fritz was second-generation Portuguese-Italian, but his mother chose Germanic nicknames for her kids. Giovanni Federico became “Fritz.”