Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2010 by Michael J. White

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any
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Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Michael J., date.
Weeping underwater looks a lot like laughter / Michael J. White.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-16329-0

1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Iowa—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.H5787W
813’.6—dc22

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

FOR NATE GEORGE, MY BROTHER AND YOURS, TOO

Acknowledgments

All my thanks to Denise Shannon, Kate Davis, Nanci McCloskey, and Koren Russell, for their faith; Jaime Manrique, Nicholas Christopher, Ben Marcus, Victoria Redel, Ben Taylor, and Jonathan Dee, for their kind wisdom and encouragement; Frank Tarsitano, for offering me incredible employment as I wrote; all my students, for their inspiration; all my family, for their love.

Messy, isn’t it?

—RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

Part

One

One

On our debut night in Des Moines, Nicholas Parsons murdered a high school senior in the hotel room directly beneath us. The following morning we received a call from the front desk receptionist announcing a cancellation of the complimentary breakfast buffet, due to the conversion of the hotel restaurant into a provisional police headquarters. All guests were to remain in their rooms until they were cleared for checkout by one of the FBI agents who were at that moment conducting brief inquiries room by room. Our inquiry came by phone three hours later, long after my dad had missed his first meeting as the new branch manager at Faith Harvest Insurance, around the time my mom began snapping bird’s-eye photos of the parking lot in the hopes of capturing killers disguised as crime-scene loiterers, and minutes after Zach leapt off the windowsill and yelled, “FUCK!” in response to injuriously pinching his hindquarters in the shifting vents of the air conditioner. My dad let the phone ring six or seven times. I’ll describe him as a kind man, but also a Vietnam War veteran built of two hundred fifty pounds of flexible girth with a voice that sounds as if it originated from an even bigger man who lived in harsh conditions among harsh women.

“This is Leon Flynn, room five-seventeen. We were supposed to check out at seven-thirty this morning, after breakfast. May I ask what this is all about, locking folks in a hotel where someone may or may not have been murdered?” He sighed and thrust his neck out (the way all men in my family do when feeling self-righteous or threatened), clearly reacting to a scripted line of questioning. “We didn’t hear a peep. My wife and I were in the double. My eldest son was in the single by the window. His younger brother was in a sleeping bag by the door.”

At the next question his eyes and head rotated machine-like toward me—first the eyes, then the head. “He’s right here,” he said, passing me the receiver despite my mom’s punitive eyeballing that suggested he might as well hand me a loaded pistol for my turn at our family rendition of Russian roulette.

Let me explain that back in the nineties the West Des Moines Holiday Inn was a mid-level business accommodation with upper-end ambitions and a hollow atrium center where you could lean over the railing to observe guest activity on any of the floors above or below. If the girl screamed, I should’ve heard it. But I didn’t hear it, even though I’d been awake a good part of the night, planning to flee Des Moines for some sun-drenched archipelago where I’d grow a beard and live off the land. (Davenport was our home, and we were still finding our feet after the Great Flood, which brought losses comparable to those in Des Moines, though in all honesty
their
losses were not
our
losses. I remain convinced that if we’d had even one living grandparent left in Davenport, including our drinking grandfather who caused his family so much grief, we never would’ve left.) I put the receiver to my ear, immediately surmising by the special agent’s captious tone that he was not a happy person, that over the course of his life he had known many disappointments.

“You’re the guy in the bag by the door?”

“That’s correct,” I said.

“When did you get into town?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday morning? Last night? Crack of dawn? I asked when you got into town.”

“Yesterday afternoon. Around four p.m.”

“Fine,” he said. “So did you hear anything?”

“No, sir. I wish I would’ve, but I didn’t.”

At that, Zach made a grand motion of unzipping his suitcase, mumbling something to the effect that my pretty-boy responses would probably result in an invitation to a full interrogation. My mom halted his unzipping with a reared set of claw-nails perfectly manicured during the course of our pay-per-view detention. The special agent yawned, unconvincingly, which made me sense he was preparing a trick question.

“Says here you’re from Davenport?”

“We’re
from
Davenport, but we’re in the middle of moving
here
. It’s supposed to be our first day in the new house.”

“Your first night in Des Moines?” he asked, as though finally stumbling on something interesting. “And a seventeen-year-old girl gets corded one floor below you?”

“She got what?”

“I’m sure you’ll read
all about it
,” he said, implying that the public’s increasing access to crime specifics was a slight on his profession. “Do you have any more information?”

“No, sir.”

“No strange noises? Nothing to report?”

“I don’t think so—”

“You don’t
think
?”

“I’m sure.”

“Fine,” he said, just before the line cut out. I held the receiver to my ear at least another five seconds, thinking it best to leave my family with the impression that the call ended more graciously than it did. “Have a nice day,” I said, then hung up. Everyone was still but for their eyebrows shifting through poses of anxiety, disbelief, accusation, etc. I considered that until I opened my mouth again it might’ve all been construed as a mishap, an overblown robbery, maybe even a joke orchestrated by one of the pranksters from the old neighborhood. My dad drew a finger along the inside of his collar, again thrusting his neck out.

“You’re sure of what, George?”

“It sounds like she was strangled. With a telephone cord.”

My mom turned to my dad. My dad turned to the ceiling. Zach turned to the parking lot six stories below. I remember feeling that all the furniture in the hotel was clenching each one of its screws, that the sun shining on the carpet and bed had suddenly sucked back its ultraviolet rays. But the moment hardly lasted five seconds before my dad was barking at Zach to drag the suitcases to the car, then disappearing downstairs, probably to visit the front desk and argue over the bill. I ended up checking for personal items under the beds and in the bathroom while my mom paced from one side of the window to the other, moving at half speed and stroking her upper left arm as though consoling it. On the drive from West Des Moines to Urbandale my dad tried to lighten the mood with a deadpan anecdote about the convoluted transportation of a Japanese lighthouse—or bell house, he wasn’t sure which—granted to an Iowan judge by the mayor of Kofu, Japan, one of Des Moines’s sister cities. We passed newly built shopping villages, megastores, labyrinthine parking lots, at least a dozen restaurants with cutesy misspelled names. Whereas in Davenport we were all content to restore our neighborhoods just as clean and cozy as they were before the flood, it appeared the goal in Des Moines was to take the opportunity to recast the city as a trendy metropolis on the move. I started feeling nauseous, suspecting we were traveling the same mysteriously looping streets and that any minute we’d be pulled over by the FBI.