The Twilight Swimmer (29 page)

             
“How much vodka?” she asked, glancing around nervously. She noticed a few passersby looking at them, but Spider drew attention wherever he went, even when he wasn’t drunk and wasn’t the only person dressed in summer clothes while everyone else wore jackets and scarves.

             
“I didn’t measure it, Brandi. Brandiwine. I don’t measure every little thing. Or every little big thing, because that would take more time to measure. Can you imagine? Like, the distance across a room with a tape measure, that’d only take a minute. But the distance to, I don’t know, Chicago? With a tape measure? That’d take forever!”

             
“You didn’t drive here, did you Spider? Tell me you didn’t drive here.”

             
In answer, Spider pulled the keys to his wagon from his pocket and gave them a jingle. They slipped through his fingers and dropped to the dirt. He stooped to pick them up, but Brandi was faster and beat him to it. She jammed them into her own pocket.

             
“You’re not getting these back, so don’t even ask.”

             
“I don’t want ‘em. I hate that car. Girls don’t like guys who drive crappy cars, even girls who think they’re the type of girl who can look past superficial stuff and judge a guy on who he is, on what he is, on how he treats her and how he feels about her. Lots of girls think that’s the type of girl they are, ‘cuz that’s the type of girl they want to be, but that type of girl does not exist,” he said with a mournful grin. “
Doesn’t
exist. Contractions.”

             
“That’s right. Contractions. Let’s get you out of public, fast.”

             
“Is your dad gonna arrest me? He didn’t arrest me last night. Didn’t even see me. Know why? I’m invisible. To everyone in your family, I’m invisible. Surprised you can even see me right now. Maybe you can’t. Maybe you can only hear me.”

             
“I can smell you,” she said, after a whiff of his breath.

             
“Better than nothing. Usually, you just leave me on a roof and run off with some other guy. Some other
thing
. Where is he tonight? It. Where is
it
? Not much water around here, so he wouldn’t like it that much. You think I don’t know about him, about
it
, about what it really is. But I know. I know. Don’t know how much longer I can keep a secret like that, Brandi.”

             
“Spider, shut up. You’re not yourself right now, and you don’t mean what you say.”

             
“I say what I mean. And I say, Brandiwine, Brandy Vine, I say that I kind of have a big little crush on you. Except it’s not a crush. It’s bigger. If you measured it, how I feel, wouldn’t want to use a tape measure. Like trying to measure the distance from Chicago.” He stared at her for a long beat as if searching for more words. “Contractions,” he finally said.

             
“You didn’t use one.”

             
“You did. It was a prediction.”

             
Brandi took Spider’s arm and led him off the ‘street’ and toward a recreation area set up with picnic tables, where families stopped for a few minutes to gobble down more deep fried food before another round of games and rides. She found an empty bench and tried to steer Spider toward it, but he resisted.

             
“Tell me you know I’m serious.”

             
“About what?”

             
“Feelings. That I have. The feelings that I have.”

             
“You’re not serious. You’re drunk.”

             
“I’m drunk
because
I’m serious. Don’t play dumb, Brandi. You’re anything but dumb.”

             
“You saw on TV that this is how people deal with it when they’re upset, or they don’t get what they want? You saw on TV that you’re supposed to drink it through? Not impressive, Spider. I’m not impressed.”

             
“What would impress you? Gills?”

             
Brandi forced Spider to sit down at the picnic table. “Keep your voice down.”

             
“
You
keep my voice down. I can say whatever I want, wherever I want. You can kick me in the heart all you want, but my voice box is my own. That’s how it works. That’s the distribution of power. Sounds academic, but it’s not. It’s simple. It’s the rules of the, of life. The rules of life. And love.”

             
“Would you please shut up?”
              “’Shut up’ and ‘please’ in the same sentence? I’m not impressed,” said Spider with a chuckle. “Not impressed!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

             
A family at a nearby table turned at the sound of Spider yelling and hurriedly got up from their table. To the kids’ dismay, they left behind half of their food. Spider reached over and snagged a half-eaten kebob, which he downed in a single mouthful before Brandi could stop him.

             
“You’re going to get kicked out of the fair. You know that, right?”

             
“Then you better give back me my car keys. Give
me
back
my
car keys, to
me
, I mean. So I can drive away and you won’t ever have to see me ever again. Which is what I saw on TV is what you do when you get jilted by a girl. You disappear. That forces her to think about what she’s done, what she’s lost. And then maybe she comes looking for you and begs you to give her a chance to make it up to you, and you can say ‘yes’, or you can say ‘no’ because you found a new girl you like better, anyway.”

             
A carnival worker approached, broom in hand. “They went to get a cop.”

             
“Who did?” asked Brandi. “That family?”

             
The carnival worker nodded and wandered off. He glanced back over his shoulder when Spider began laughing uncontrollably. “He’s gonna sweep me into the trash if I don’t start behaving? With his broom? Brooms! Who still uses brooms?!”

             
Brandi covered Spider’s mouth with her hand, but he pushed it aside and kept laughing.

             
“You heard him, Jesse. My dad is coming. We’re both going to regret this.”

             
“I’m gonna ask for your hand in marriage.”

             
“Jesse—”

             
“Don’t call me that. You have to care about me, to get to call me that.”

             
“I do care about you.”

             
“Then why are you hurting me?”

             
Before Brandi could answer, she saw other spectators look up as someone approached from behind her. She turned around, following their eyes, expecting to see her father. Instead, she saw Dallas. He was wearing his uniform, his hair combed back perfectly and his hand on his radio.

             
“Brandi, is he all right?”

             
“He’s fine. Just—”

             
“Yeah, I can see.”

             
Dallas crouched down beside Spider to get a better look at his eyes. Spider closed them defiantly.

             
“He’s a friend of yours?”

             
“Nope,” said Spider, with a laugh.

             
“Yes, he’s a friend,” answered Brandi.

“Then I’ll drive him home.”

              Spider opened his eyes. “If I’m her friend, you’ll drive me home? No handcuffs? Why is that, huh? Are you her boyfriend or something?” Spider turned to Brandi, his eyes open wide in feigned shock. “Is there any guy in the whole town you don’t like more than you like me? You even have the hots for a scumbag cop?”

             
Brandi shook her head and backed away from Spider. He reached after her, but Dallas intercepted his arm and pushed it down to his body. Spider resisted Dallas, but was too disoriented and off-balance to put up much of a fight.

             
“If I smell on your breath what I think I smell, you’ve got two options. You can let me drive you home, right now, or this night can get a lot worse for you. What’s it gonna be?” asked Dallas.

             
“Contractions,” said Spider.

             
“What are you talking about?” asked Dallas.

             
Spider turned to Brandi, grinning apishly. “You have the hots for this asshole and he doesn’t even know grammar.” And then, with surprising speed and accuracy, Spider balled one hand into a fist and punched Dallas squarely in the jaw. There wasn’t a lot on the punch, but it caught Dallas so off-guard that he stumbled back a few steps. Spider sprung up from the picnic table and looked at Dallas, more than a little shocked by what he had just done. He raised his hands in apology and took a step forward, but Dallas was furious and already marching toward him, a trickle of blood on his lip.
              “That was an accident. An accident!” hollered Spider as Dallas spun him around and pushed him over the edge of the picnic table. A crowd had formed, and pushed closer to get a better view of Dallas wrenching Spider’s arms behind his back and slapping handcuffs on his wrists. “Brandi, help me!”

             
“How, Spider? You just punched a policeman.”

             
“Call your dad! He’ll see my side of it.”

             
“I’ll call her dad myself, so I don’t knock your jaw off.” Dallas pulled his radio from his belt and started dialing for the right frequency.

             
“I don’t think he’s got his radio tonight,” said Brandi.

             
“Why not?”

             
“Family time,” she answered with a sigh.

             
With a grunt, Dallas yanked Spider back to his feet. He grabbed the handcuffs between Spider’s wrists and gave him a push in the general direction of the parking lot. Spider winced at the strain of metal against his skin, and his knees knocked together as he took a few steps, but he never took his eyes off Brandi. They were every bit as mournful as before, but there was something else behind the sadness.

             
Anger.

             
“Try not to hurt him,” she urged Dallas.

             
“He’s a big boy. He’ll be fine.”

             
“Dallas, please—”

             
“Yeah Dallas, please,” said Spider, raising his voice an octave in a poor, and poorly timed, impression of Brandi.

             
Dallas took hold of both Spider’s shoulders and perp walked him through the crowd, toward the parking lot. Brandi fell into step behind them, keeping a close watch on Spider’s feet as they precariously found purchase time and again despite the seeming inevitability of a fall.

             
When they reached the parking lot, they found Conrad and Sherri standing by her father’s police cruiser. They were engaged in a serious discussion, Sherri waving her arms frantically while Conrad tried to keep her calm. They looked up as Dallas approached with his prisoner, but didn’t seem to take much notice of either. Instead, they both locked eyes on Brandi.

             
“Where were you?” asked Conrad, his voice breaking just a bit.

             
“I was with Dallas.”

             
“It’s all right, boss. I’ve got this kid under control. I’ll have Sally call his parents to come pick him up, or leave him at the station if they’d rather he sleep it off there. What do you think, my man, will your parents let you think it over on a cold bench for a few hours or will they rush down to pick up their little angel?”

             
Spider chuckled very softly, bending his arms at the elbow to flap them like wings.

             
“Very funny,” said Dallas. “What’s underage drinking, a misdemeanor?” he asked Conrad. But Conrad wasn’t listening. He was still looking at Brandi and listening to the indiscernible muttering of Sherri. Brandi noticed, now, that her mother’s makeup was streaking down her face where tears had ruined it.

             
“Where’s Cody?” Brandi asked, suddenly uneasy.

             
“Why weren’t you with your brother?!” Sherri yelled, fresh tears coming fast. She shook her head at Brandi, her eyes narrow and dark. “Where were you?”

             
“Calm down, Sherri. It’s my fault, not Brandi’s. And he’s only been missing fifteen minutes.”

             
“Missing?” Brandi asked, her unease quickly turning to panic.

             
Dallas had let go of Spider, and the two of them were watching the Vine family with concerned interest. Spider shifted his weight uneasily and glanced at Dallas, asking with his eyes if he could take the cuffs off, promising with his eyes that he had sobered up and wouldn’t do anything crazy like run for it.

             
Sherri started to shake. “What if he went to the beach? Like his sister, like Jenny. What if he went to the… to the beach?!”

             
Conrad took his wife in his arms. “We’ll search the grounds, then we’ll search everywhere else. We’ll find him, Sherri. I promise you we’ll find him.”

             
Dallas took a step toward Conrad. “Want me to drive the perimeter?”

             
“Yes, and give me your handheld.”

             
Dallas gave Conrad his radio, then scrambled into his own cruiser, parked next to the sheriff’s. He climbed back out a moment later and jogged back to Spider, who raised his hands and waited patiently for Dallas to insert the key in the lock. When the cuffs were off, Spider nodded gratefully and rubbed his wrists. “I can help look, too. Over heads, you know.”

             
Conrad nodded at Spider, and Spider glanced at Brandi. Together, they walked back to the fairgrounds. Conrad and Sherri lingered for a few more moments, quietly arguing, then followed them.

             
Dallas turned on his cruiser’s lights and drove off the gravel parking surface and onto the grass, rumbling across the uneven ground in a wide curve along the back side of the fair grounds.

             
They searched the grounds in silence, the four of them spreading out to cover as much territory as possible. Conrad took the south side, beyond the southernmost ‘street’ where the carnival workers continued to bark about food and prizes. Brandi and Spider took the other two ‘streets’, and Sherri searched the rides where many fair patrons were still lined up for one last thrill before heading home for the night. The crowd had thinned out, which made the search easier, but it was still nearly impossible to find a single child if he didn’t want to be found. And Brandi was becoming more convinced that Cody had disappeared on purpose.

             
The backpack. Cody’s backpack.

             
Brandi saw Dallas pull his cruiser up on the backside of the fairgrounds, beyond the rides. She ran toward him, pushing past some school classmates who tried to stop her to say hello, past Spider who was scanning the crowd from atop an overturned waste basket, past her mother who was leaning against the blue plastic wall of a portable toilet, her new haircut blowing out of shape as she buried her face in her hands.

             
“Dallas!” she yelled to get his attention. “I think I know where he is.”

             
“Where’s your dad?” He leaned back into the cruiser and slipped his radio out of the cradle, but all he got was static. “Must be weather coming. I can’t raise him.”

             
“We have to go get Cody, right now.”

             
“Not without telling your father—”

             
“We have to go, Dallas!”

             
Dallas scanned the fairgrounds, searching for Conrad. Unable to spot the sheriff, he looked down at Brandi and the urgency in her eyes.

             
“Are we walking or driving?” he asked.

             
“He’s walking, so we’re walking. We might find him on the way.”

             
“I’ll leave a note on the dash for your dad.”

              They had searched the fairgrounds for at least an hour after Cody disappeared. That meant he had a lead of an hour and fifteen minutes. His legs were short, but he was fast if he wanted to be. If he was running, his backpack slapping against his slender shoulder blades, he could have reached the cabin already.

             
Brandi and Dallas ran from the fair, across the fallow fields littered with garbage that had blown from picnic tables and food carts. They ran through the decayed remains of crops from years past, long since dead and brown and turning to dust. They reached the tree line and ran into the forest, both of them breathing hard but not slowing down. When they passed the tree line, the bare tree branches closed in overhead and blotted out most of the moon’s light, turning the dark night much darker.

             
Dallas had a slim flashlight in his belt and removed it, illuminating the forest floor as they ran. The beam was just powerful enough to pick out raised roots that threatened to trip them and burrowed holes that threatened to swallow a foot and break an ankle. Brandi scanned the ground as they ran, futilely searching for evidence that Cody had traveled through the same area. She saw nothing so obvious as a child’s footprint or a scrap of clothing stuck to the sharp tip of a branch, but she felt certain he had been here nonetheless. She hoped he had thought to bring a flashlight and extra batteries, buried somewhere in that overstuffed backpack.

How had she failed to predict he was planning something like this? He had shown such interest in meeting the Swimmer, and had seen the photographs taken in the hunting cabin. Of course that would be the first place he looked. It was so obvious.

They could hear the trickle of flowing water a few minutes before they reached the edge of the waterway. They stopped for a few minutes to catch their breath. Dallas dropped to his knees to splash the icy water on his face and drink. Brandi would have stopped Dallas from drinking if she’d realized what he was about to do. She was every bit as thirsty, but knew better than to drink the water without boiling it first.

She took the flashlight from Dallas and passed it over the wet ground at the water’s edge, once again looking for evidence of her brother. There were prints, but all of them belonged to animals. There were raccoon prints, deer prints, even what looked like fox prints. She thought, for a moment, of the animal she and Jenny had rescued from this very forest. But her thoughts quickly returned to Cody, and she started moving west along the river edge.

“We can follow the river all the way to the cabin. That’s what Cody would have done,” said Brandi.

Dallas lumbered to his feet and trotted after her, sucking wind but keeping up.

When they finally reached the cabin, Brandi was distraught to see that it was dark. There was no ribbon of light slipping under the front door, no yellow square where the window stood out against the cabin wall. The cabin appeared to be empty, as empty as the night before when she left with the Swimmer, desperate to return her to her home and him to the ocean before the sun rose. She slowed as she approached the cabin, her energy suddenly gone and her legs rubbery from the long run to reach this place. Dallas had fallen behind her the last quarter mile. When he saw the dark cabin, he stopped jogging all together and dropped to a squat, his chest heaving.

“He’s not… here,” said Dallas, breathless.

“I know this is where he went. I
know
it,” said Brandi, her lip quivering from the cold or from fear. Maybe both.

“Why here?” asked Dallas.

“Cody? Cody!” She marched up to the cabin and circled it, calling out her brother’s name as she fought off tears. If he had intended to come here, to the cabin, and hadn’t beaten them here, it could only mean that he was lost somewhere in the woods. What if he hadn’t dressed warmly enough? What if he was hurt? What if he had taken a drink from the same water Dallas so recklessly drank? He could be doubled over with abdominal pains, too weak even to call out for help. They could have run right past him in the dark and never would have known. Now, they would never find him before sunrise. Even then, even with the light, it would be so hard.

And it might be too late.

She felt her feet bump against something. She looked down, aiming the flashlight at her feet. It was Cody’s backpack. It was unzipped, and half its contents had spilled out onto the cold ground. Unopened cans of tuna fish, several pairs of socks, a stack of comic books, roadside emergency flares and an empty camera case.

“Cody! I know you’re here, Cody!”

At last, she found the prints she had been looking for all night. Next to the backpack, the size of her brother’s prepubescent feet, the tread from his sneakers perfectly preserved. They were pointing away from the cabin, down toward the water, and she followed them down the gentle slope.

Dallas had regained his breath and fell into step beside her. “Why here, Brandi? What makes you so sure he came here?” But then he saw the prints in the dirt and understood that the reason no longer mattered. The boy was here, somewhere.

At the water’s edge, the tracks became overlapped. It appeared that Cody had stood here, on this very spot, for a while. He had moved around this small area, but had lingered here. And then? Where had he gone? There were no tracks leading away from this spot, no line of sneaker prints leading back to the cabin. Just the water.

“I don’t understand, Brandi.”

Brandi’s tears came fast and warm against her cold cheeks. She was shuddering, her shoulders jumping in minor convulsions. She swept the flashlight over the surface of the water, but saw nothing.

“These tracks could be old. When was the last time—”

“His backpack is by the cabin,” Brandi sobbed. “He had it an hour ago, at the fair.”

Dallas placed a consoling hand on Brandi’s elbow, but she shook him off and marched down the shore, downstream. She stumbled, taking an awkward step into the water with one foot, but kept moving. She kept passing the beam of the flashlight over the water, now afraid of what she might find. The image flooded her mind of her brother’s body pinned beneath the surface, no breath in his lungs but eerily animated by the current. The image blended with images of her sister, images of Jenny, lying lifeless on the beach with her hands folded gracefully on her chest.

“Cody! Where are you, Cody?!” she yelled.

Dallas walked up the shore in the opposite direction, upstream. If Cody had fallen in the water, he would not have floated this direction. But if he had entered the water intentionally, he could have walked upstream for a while before emerging. There could be new tracks, new sneaker tread patterns in the dirt. It was difficult to see without his flashlight, but the forest canopy broken open above the water and the moon cast just enough light to guide him onward.

Then he heard Brandi scream.

Dallas spun on his heels so fast he lost his balance and slipped. His legs went out from under him, and though he caught some of his weight with one extended hand, he still landed hard on his side. Covered in mud, one pants leg soaked through, he climbed to his feet and ran back downstream. He could see Brandi’s dark silhouette standing at the edge of the water, the flashlight beam extending from her black hand as if the hand itself were glowing. And in the beam, standing in the water and naked from the waist up, he saw a tall male figure holding a child.