The Wooden Sea (3 page)

sound of its 900cc engine alone is worth the price of admission. And there is nothing more pleasant than driving it slowly through Crane's View, New York, on a morning like that. The day hasn't started yet, hasn't turned the sign in its front window to read OPEN yet. Only diehards are out and about. A smiling woman sweeps her front doorstep with a red broom. A young weimaraner, its stump tail wagging madly, sniffs garbage cans placed at a curb. An old man wearing a white ball cap and sweatsuit is either jogging slowly or walking as fast as he can.

Seeing someone exercising immediately inspired me to think of French crullers and coffee with lots of cream. I'd stop and get both, but there was one thing to do first.

After a few slow lefts and rights, I pulled up in front of the Schiavo house to see if anything had changed. No car was parked either in the driveway or near the house. I knew they owned a blue Mercury, but no blue cars were in sight. I tried the front door. It was still open.

We'd have to change that. Couldn't have a thief going in and stealing their painting-on-velvet of the Bay of Naples. I'd send someone over today to put temporary locks on the doors and leave a note for the elusive Donald and Geri.

Not that I cared about either them or their possessions. Standing with hands in my pockets looking around, it was too beautiful a morning to have a weird little mystery like this to think about, especially when it had to do with diose two jerks. But it was the job to care so I would.

My pocket phone rang. It was Magda saying our car wouldn't start. She was the queen of I-Hate-Technology and proud of it. This woman did not want to know how to work a computer, a calculator, any thingamajig that went beep-beep. She balanced her checkbook doing multiplication and division with a pencil, used a microwave oven with the greatest suspicion, and cars were her enemy if they didn't start immediately when the key was turned. The irony was her daughter was a computer whiz who was in the midst of applying to tough colleges that specialized in the field. Amused, Magda stared at Pauline's talents and shrugged.

"I drove that car all day yesterday."

"I know, Poodles, but it still doesn't start."

"You didn't flood the motor? Remember the time--"

Her voice rose. "Frannie, don't go there. Do you want me to call the mechanic or do you want to fix it?"

"Call the mechanic. Are you sure you didn't--"

"I'm sure. Know what else? Our garage smells great. Did you spray air freshener in there? What did you do?"

"Nothing. The car that was fine yesterday won't start, but the garage smells good?"

"Right."

One beat. Two beats. "Mag, I'm biting my tongue over here. There are things I want to say to you but I'm holding back--"

"Good! Keep holding. I'll call the garage. See you later." Click. If she hung up any faster I would have given her a speeding ticket. I was sure she'd done something wicked like flood the carburetor. _Again.

_But you cut deals with your partner in marriage; they give you longitude and you give them latitude. That way, if you're lucky, you create a map together of a shared world both can recognize and inhabit comfortably.

Work that morning was the usual nothing much. The mayor came in to discuss erecting a traffic light at an intersection where there had been way too many accidents in the last few years. Her name is Susan Ginnety. We had been lovers in high school and Susan never forgave me for it.

Thirty years ago I was the baddest fellow in our town. There are still stories floating around about what a bad seed I was back then and most of them are true. If I had a photo album from that time, all of the pictures in there of me would be either in profile or straight on, holding up a police identification number.

Unlike miscreant me, Susan was a good girl who thought she heard the call of the wild and decided to try on being bad like a jean jacket.

So she started hanging around with me and the crew. That mistake ended in disaster fast. In the end she reeled away from the smoking wreck of her innocence, went to college and studied politics while I went to Vietnam

(involuntarily) and studied dead people.

After college Susan lived in Boston, San Diego, and Manhattan. One weekend she returned to visit her family and decided there was no place like home. She married a high-powered entertainment lawyer who liked the idea of living in a small town by the Hudson. They bought a house on Villard Hill, and a year later Susan began running for public office.

The interesting thing was that her husband, Frederick Morgan, is black.

Crane's View is a conservative town comprised mostly of middle-to lower middle-class Irish and Italian families not so many generations removed from steerage.

From their ancestors they inherited an obsession with close family ties, a willingness to work
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hard, and a general suspicion of anything or anyone different. Before the Morgan/Ginnetys came, there had never been a mixed-race couple living in the town. If they had arrived in the early sixties when I was a kid we would have said nigger a lot and thrown rocks through their windows. But thank God some things do change. A black mayor was elected in the eighties who did a good job and graced the office. From the beginning townspeople realized the Morgans were a nice couple and we were lucky to have them.

After they moved to Crane's View and Susan heard I was chief of police, apparently her reaction was to cover her face and groan. When we met on the street for the first time in fifteen years she walked right up and said in an accusing voice, "You should be in prison! But you went to college and now you're chief of _police?"_

I said sweetly, "Hi, Susan. _You _changed. How come I can't?"

"Because you're horrible, McCabe."

After being elected mayor she said to me, "You and I are going to have to work together a lot and I want to have a peaceful heart about it.

You were _the _worst boyfriend in the history of the penis. Are you a good policeman?"

"Uh-huh. You can look at my record. I'm sure you will."

"You're right. I'll look very closely. Are you corrupt?"

"I don't have to be. I have a lot of money from my first marriage."

"Did you steal it from her?"

"No. I gave her an idea for a TV show. She was a producer."

Her eyes narrowed. "What show?"

_"Man Overboard."_

"That's the most ridiculous show on television--"

_"And _the most successful for a while."

"Yes. It was your idea? I guess I should be impressed, but I'm not.

Shall we get to work?"

* * *

At our traffic-light meeting that summer morning, we finished with my giving Susan a briefing on what had been going on in town policewise the last week.

As usual she listened with head down and a small silver tape recorder in hand in case she wanted to note anything. There really was no interesting news.

Bill Pegg had to remind me to tell her about the disappearance of the
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Schiavos.

"What are you doing about it?" She brought the recorder to her mouth, hesitated, and lowered it again.

"Asking around, making some phone calls, putting locks on their doors.

It's a free country, Mayor, they can leave if they want."

"The way they left sounds pretty strange."

I thought about that. "Yes, but I also know the Schiavos and so do you.

They're both emotional wackos. I could easily imagine them having a big messy fight and storming off in opposite directions. Both probably thinking Til stay out all night and scare èm.'

The only problem being neither thought to lock the doors before they left."

"Ah, love!" Bill said, unwrapping his midmorning sandwich.

"Did you talk to their parents?"

Bill spoke around a mouthful. "I did. Neither have heard a word."

"What's the usual time frame for filing a missing persons report?"

"Twenty-four hours."

"Frannie, will you take care of that if it's necessary?"

I nodded. She looked at Bill and, voice faltering, asked if he would leave us alone for a moment.

Very surprised, he got up quickly and left. Susan had never done that before. She was as upfront and direct as anyone around. I knew she liked Bill for his wit and candor and he liked her for the same reasons.

Asking him to leave meant something big and probably personal was about to land in that room. When the door closed I sat up straighter in the chair and looked at her.

Suddenly she wouldn't meet my stare.

"What's up, Mayor?" I tried to sound light and friendly-- the milky fuzz on top of a cappuccino you tongue through before getting to the coffee below.

She pulled in a loud deep breath. One of those breaths you take before saying something that's going to change everything. You know as soon as it's out your world will be different. "Fred and I are going to separate."

"Is that good or bad?"

She laughed, barked really, and pushed her hair back. "That's so _you, _Frannie, to say it like that. Everyone I've told so far says either `the shit!' or `poor you' or some such thing. Not McCabe."

I turned both hands palms up like what else am I supposed to say?

"He's going off to grow chili peppers."

_"What?"_

"That's what my first wife said when we split up. There's this primitive tribe in Bolivia. When one of its members dies, they say he's gone off to grow chili peppers."

"Fred hates chili peppers. He hates all spicy foods." It was clear she needed something safe and inane to say to pole-vault her over the painful admission she had just made. That's why I tried to help with the chili pepper remark.

"How do you feel about it?"

She worked on a smile but it didn't work. "Like I'm falling from the top of a building and have a few more floors to go before I hit?"

"It would be unnatural if you didn't. I bought a coatimundi when I broke up and then forgot to feed it. Do you think the separation's final, or are you just taking it out for a test-drive?"

"It's pretty final."

"Your doing or his?"

Her head rose slowly. She stared at me with flames and daggers in her eyes but didn't speak.

"It's a question, Susan, not an accusation."

"Was your breakup your fault or your wife's?"

"Mine, I guess mine. Gloria got bored with me and started fucking around."

"Then it was her fault!"

"Blame is always convenient because it's so decisive: My fault. Your fault.

But marriage is never that clear-cut. He pisses you off here, you piss him off there. Sometimes you end up with a toilet bowl so full neither of you can flush it."

That conversation made me miss and realize again how grateful I was for my wife. It made me want to see her immediately so I went home for lunch. But Magda wasn't there and neither was Pauline. Different as they were, the two women liked hanging around together. Anyone would like hanging around with Magda. She was funny, tough, and very perceptive. Most of the time she knew exactly what was good for you even when you didn't. She was stubborn but not unbending. She knew what she liked. If she liked you, your world became bigger.

My first wife, the inglorious Gloria, shrunk the world like heavy rain on leather shoes and made me feel like I no longer fit in it. She was beautiful, endlessly dishonest, bulimic, and as I later found out, promiscuous as a bunny. At the end of our relationship I found a note she had written and in all likelihood left out for me to see. It said, "I hate his smell, his sperm, and his spit."

Eating lunch alone, I contentedly sat in the living room listening to my thoughts and the buzz of a lawnmower someplace far away. If her marriage really was finished, I did not envy Susan the next act of her life. In contrast, I was at a place in my own where I didn't envy anyone anything. I liked my days, my partner, job, surroundings. I was working on liking myself but that was always an ongoing, iffy process.

Over the friendly smell of my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, an increasingly pungent fragrance of something else began to butt in. I didn't pay much attention while eating, but it became so pervasive as I slipped an afterlunch cigarette between my lips that I stopped and took a long, serious sniff.

The nose can be like a blind mole brought up into the sunlight. Below ground--in your unconscious--it knows exactly what it's doing and will guide you: That stinks--stay away. That's good--have a taste. But bring it above ground, demand to know _What's that smell, _and it moves its blind head around and around in confused circles and loses all sense of direction. I asked out loud, "What _is _that fucking smell?" But my nose couldn't tell me because _that _smell was an incomprehensible combination of aromas I had loved my entire life.

This is a crucial point, but I don't know how to describe it so it makes better sense.

A whore I visited in Vietnam always wore a certain kind of orchid in her hair. Her English was minimal so the only understandable translation she could come up for the flower was "bird breath."

Naturally when I got back to the States and asked, no one had ever heard of a bird breath orchid. And I never smelled it again until that afternoon in my living room in Crane's View, New York, nine thousand miles from Saigon.

Naturally my brain had long ago put the aroma in its dead-letter file and forgotten about it.

Now here it was again.

Remember me?

But it was only one in a swirling, illusive combination of cherished smells.

Cut grass, wood smoke, hot asphalt, sweat on a woman you are making love with, Creed's

"Orange Spice" cologne, fresh-ground coffee... my list of favorites and there were more. All of them were there together _at the same time _in the air. Once it had my full attention, neither my conscious nor unconscious mind could believe it.

I had to stand up, had to find where it was coming from or I'd go crazv. The trail led to the garage. I remembered that in our conversation earlier, Magda had said how good it smelled in there.