The Wooden Sea Read online

“This is where you died, stupid kid.” Holding her elbow in my hand, I ran my thumb tenderly over the mark and whispered to her, “Right here.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Empty-headed, refusing to believe, I automatically looked up from her arm upon hearing the soft, slurry voice.

  Antonya’s head rolled slowly from left to right until it faced me. She opened her eyes and spoke again in that same, not-quite-there voice. “I wasn’t supposed to die.”

  “You’re alive!”

  “No. But I can still feel your hand. I feel your warmth.” Her voice was a halting whisper, a trickle. Her tap had been turned off but some water was still left in the pipe, a dribble. “Tell my mother I didn’t do this. Tell her they did it to me.”

  “Who did it? Who’s they!”

  “Find the dog.” Her eyes stayed open but emptied. Every trace of life oozed out, into the air, back into life. I saw it go. Nothing specifically happened, but I knew exactly what was going on. Life left her and then she was gone.

  Still on one knee I stared, willing her back, willing her to come back and help me understand.

  “Frannie?” Bill stood in the doorway, holding it open with an arm. “The ambulance is here and I’ve called the girl’s mother. I’m going over there now. Is that okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fran, you okay?”

  “Yeah. Listen, tell Redmond I want to look in her locker. And if she had a gym locker, in there too.”

  I waited there while they got the body ready to move. They took their time. I was making notes when one of the ambulance guys said, “Whoa! Check this out!”

  Looking up, I saw him holding a feather—the feather I had already seen too many times. I took it out of his hand and had a closer look to make sure. “Where’d this come from?”

  He gave a dirty chuckle and raised his eyebrows. “Fell out from under her skirt! Do you believe that? What’s she doing with a feather up her dress?” he leered.

  “I’ll keep this.” I put the feather between the pages of my notebook and closed it.

  From the expression on his face the guy thought I was joking. He whined, “Aw come on, Chief, I want it.”

  “Finish up and stop fuckin’ around!”

  Smiles fell off their faces and they were done in five minutes.

  I followed the gurney as they rolled it down the hall. Classes were still in session, so luckily we didn’t have to go by a slew of gawking kids.

  Passing the principal’s office, I stopped and went in. His secretary immediately handed me a slip of paper with Antonya’s locker number and combination written on it. The woman said none of the kids were given permanent gym lockers anymore because the school was too overcrowded now and there weren’t enough to go around.

  At the top of the paper, a bright pink Post-it note, was written number 622. An instant later it hit me like a stubbed toe: the same locker number I’d had as a senior at Crane’s View High School. The number below it, the lock combination, was also the same as thirty years ago.

  “This is right? This is correct?” My voice bounced all over the place.

  Puzzled, she nodded. “Yes. I just copied it out of her file ten minutes ago.”

  “Son of a bitch!” I’d planned to ask Redmond more questions but not anymore. I had to look inside that locker now. I was no longer confused, no longer at a loss. My wife says watch out for Frannie when he knows who the enemy is. Antonya said she was murdered. Rushing out of the office, the horrible thought struck me that she might have been killed for no other reason than she had the same school locker as I once did. Old Vertue, teenage me, the Schiavo house, Antonya. Who was doing all this and what did they want from me?

  A bell rang to mark the end of class. The big Bap! Bam! Bap! of doors flung open and hitting walls rang out everywhere. Kids flooded into the halls with the manic, jailbreak energy that comes from being held prisoner in algebra class for forty-five minutes. Cliques gathered like metal filings pulled by a magnet, bodies bumped or crashed into each other on their way to anywhere. Shouts and whistles, crazy laughter came from all over. Three minutes of freedom. Lovers met for intense head-to-heads before the next class, like an undertow, pulled them apart and shoved them back into Yawnsville for another forty-five.

  I remembered all of it. How could you ever forget being sixteen and full of equal measures of hope and shit?

  “Hey, Chief.”

  “Hey, Mr. McCabe!”

  I recognized a few of the students. Some bad boys looked away as soon as we made eye contact. I gave a wink and two small “hi there” waves to other kids—nothing else. Those who greeted me didn’t want more. I knew how this worked: proper high school etiquette. No matter how well we knew each other outside the building, this was their turf and their rules. I was an adult and a cop. Read “outsider.”

  I slowed a little on realizing I was doing one of those weirdo speed walks you see on the summer Olympics. That is, right before you switch the TV channel to anything more interesting than a bunch of adults walking like ducks in Nikes. It made no sense hurrying to Antonya’s locker because I couldn’t open it until the kids were gone again. There was no telling what was inside, and I didn’t want others around for any more ugly surprises.

  About twenty feet away I caught sight of Pauline. She stood off to one side of the hall talking to some girls. She didn’t notice me until I was almost past.

  “Frannie! Is it true about Antonya Corando?”

  I stopped and nodded hello to her pals, who were watching me with a mixture of interest and distrust. “What do you hear?”

  “That she’s dead.”

  “It’s true.”

  The girls looked at each other. One put a hand over her mouth and closed her eyes tightly.

  “Did you know her, Pauline?”

  “A little. Sort of. Sometimes we were in the computer lab together. We’d talk.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Intense. I heard she was a good artist, that she could draw really well. But I almost never saw her because she was always studying.”

  One of the other girls said in an accusing voice, “Sounds familiar!” as if Pauline was guilty of the same crime. The class bell rang again. As they were walking away, one of the girls said way too loudly, “Your stepfather’s cuuute.”

  “Don’t be perverse!” Pauline’s voice was outraged.

  I stood looking out a window until the halls were empty and quiet again. Down in the parking lot the ambulance was pulling out onto the street. I imagined the girl’s body on the gurney, Doc Marten’d feet open in a F, arms crossed on her chest. There was that small red bump on the inside of her left arm. Tell my mother I didn’t do this. They did it to me.

  Years ago after Magda and I first became lovers, we spent an especially frenzied afternoon in bed. When we were done and shiny wet—sated, finished, filled–her face four inches from mine—she looked me ten miles deep in the eye and said, “Remember me like this, Frannie. No matter what happens, no matter how long this lasts between us. I want you to remember me like this, the way I look right now.”

  Antonya? I would remember her head against that white tile wall, the dead eyes opening slowly to tell me her last fact. Ididn’t do this.

  Locker 622. I’d once kept a loaded pistol in there for two weeks. A pistol, then a deadly brown recluse spider in a Jif peanut butter jar, a homemade Molotov cocktail I whipped up in shop class and dropped in the window of a teacher’s car. Later I hid the stolen grade-book of my American History teacher in that locker and a signed first edition of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales our English teacher had brought in to show the class. As a teenager I stole everything because I thought everything I wanted should belong to me.

  Instinctively I put my thumb against the lock and my other fingers behind it. Turning the wheel back and forth, I put in the combination. After the last number in the sequence, the lock gave a slight click. I slid up the handle and swung the door open.

  A k
id’s school locker is her inner sanctum. In it she builds a shrine to her dreams, her everyday, her wannabe image of herself. Antonya Corando’s was no exception. Inside the door was taped a black-and-white Calvin Klein ad torn from a magazine. On it a handsome guy wearing extremely white underpants stared at the horizon. Maybe he was looking for the rest of his clothes. On the walls inside the locker were many other pictures—puppies, fashion models, bad Polaroid snapshots of family and friends looking pleased or silly. Nothing special, everything sad now in light of what had just happened. Who would take these pictures down, her mother? I imagined the poor woman opening the door, seeing this sweet little world and staggering for the hundredth time since learning the news of her daughter’s death. Would her mom know why each of these pictures had been important to the girl? Would she save or throw them away because they were radioactive with her Antonya?

  The same thing had happened to Magda’s mother thirty years ago after her daughter was murdered. The woman saved everything. Only after she died was I able to convince Magda to put her sister’s stuff in boxes and store it far away from our house and our life.

  Geometry textbook, world history, jazzy blue calculator, a comic book called Sandman, gym clothes (nothing flashy or expensive), almost too many pens and felt-tip markers. Two CDs: Willy DeVille and Randy Newman—interesting taste in music.

  “What’s this?” Lying way in the back of the locker was a large black ring binder. Sliding it out, I assumed it was Antonya’s class notebook. But wouldn’t she have carried that with her? Why was it here? I opened the book and the first few pages were only that—class notes. In careful italic handwriting were extensive notes (with important passages highlighted in yellow) on Plato, Sophocles, the Hellenic Empire, yada yada. I almost stopped flipping pages because it all looked like Greek to me and who cared?

  At the bottom of the next page was the drawing. Like an afterthought, a doodle, a two-minute mind nap during class was an absolutely terrific pencil sketch of Old Vertue. What’s more, he was sitting in the same pose I had seen in the painting George Dalemwood showed me at his house. What’s more, on the ground in front of the dog was the feather.

  I turned the page.

  The Hangman’s Shove

  “They’re absolutely amazing.”

  “George, I’m glad you like them. But what the hell do they mean?”

  As usual my good friend ignored me, not even looking up from Antonya’s notebook when I spoke. He wore his square Clark Kent reading glasses—the ones with frames so thick and black they resembled two small TV sets joined over his nose.

  “And she said they killed her?” He stared at a detailed colored-pencil drawing of Frannie Junior and me looking at the Schiavo house wrapped in its metal spiderweb scaffolding. Everything about that night was in the drawing, even Smith the cat at our feet.

  Antonya Corando’s loose-leaf binder contained six pages of meticulous notes about the rise of the Greek Empire. Another twenty pages were her drawings depicting what had recently been going on in my life. Later I spent a long time trying to find if she had done other relevant drawings. After searching everywhere it appeared these were the only ones.

  To this day I cannot tell whether those pictures were any good. George thought they were the work of a prodigy, someone on par with other great naive “outsider” artists like Henry Darger or A. G. Rizzoli. I wouldn’t know. To me they seemed more like explosions on paper. Looking at them, you knew whoever drew these things was seriously troubled and maybe even insane.

  Old Vertue was doorman to Antonya’s warped kingdom. In the first illustration, at the bottom of a page of notes on Greece, the dog sat in that familiar pose with the feather in front of him. Startled I mumbled, “What’re you doing here?” and turned the page.

  The second drawing was of him lying in the parking lot of the Grand Union market. It took a moment to remember that’s where he’d been found the first day I met him. What set An-tonya’s drawings apart was at the center of each was a careful likeness of something literal and easily recognizable—Vertue in the parking lot, Frannie Junior and me looking at the Schiavo house. But everything else in her pictures was from Antonya Corando’s outer limits.

  Her “Vertue in the parking lot” was a perfect example. Around the outside edges of the paper, like a Hieronymous-Bosch-meets-R-Crumb designed picture frame, dancing razor blades held hands with pieces of popcorn which were shitting lizards with human heads. Immediately inside that frame was a second: cabbages with smiley faces bleeding gobbets of bright red blood from hatchets and knives buried in their heads. Androgynous angels flying overhead pissed down on them. Giant words were black-crayoned across all of the drawings. Words like “smegma,” “abscess,” “Hi, Mom!” as well as obscure phrases like “Jesus Soup” or “manus maleficiens.” George explained that was Latin for “the hand that knows no good.”

  He slid his glasses down his nose and over until they hung precariously off his right ear. “When did this all start, Frannie?”

  “The day I buried Old Vertue.”

  He nodded and flipped pages in the book till he came to Antonya’s drawing of me putting the dog in the ground. “Did you notice this?” He pointed to a small detail in the picture. I couldn’t see it clearly so I leaned forward.

  “What?”

  “The black shovel. There are three things that appear in every one of her drawings—that shovel, lizards—”

  “And me.”

  “And you, that’s right.”

  “What am I supposed to do with that, George? Shovels, lizards, and me? No, wait a minute—I also buried my father with that shovel. You think that has anything to do with it?”

  “Let’s assume it does. What about the lizards?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do you like lizards? Are they important to you?”

  “Are you nuts?” I jabbed a finger at the middle of my forehead to emphasize the point. “George, forget the lizards, willya? I’m confused enough.”

  “All right. Then the best thing now is to go see if the dog is still buried in the yard.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Have you looked back there since we put him in?”

  “Yes. Nothing was different.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d resurrected and was sitting on my front step.”

  George put down Antonya’s notebook and slowly laid his glasses on top of it. He paused, sighed, ran a hand through his thinning hair. “I’m nervous about this, Frannie. I think I’m afraid to look.”

  “Nothing wrong with being afraid.”

  His eyes fell to his lap. “Are you ever afraid?”

  I made to say something but stopped. George knew me too well. It was useless to lie. “No, not very often.”

  He nodded as if he’d known that all along. “You were never afraid. As long as I’ve known you I’ve never seen you afraid.”

  I reached into a pocket and brought out my knife. “Fear is like this knife, George. It serves one purpose: it cuts into things. Keep it folded in your pocket and it can’t hurt you.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “You create your fear. It’s not out there like an infectious disease. Mostly it comes from love. When you love something so much you can’t bear to lose it, then fear’s always nearby. I’ve never loved anything enough to worry about losing it. That’s my fuckup. Magda says it’s the most pathetic thing about me. She’s probably right.”

  “You don’t love your wife enough to fear losing her?”

  I shook my head.

  “Do you really mean that, Frannie?”

  I wouldn’t look at him. “Yes. Let’s go.”

  Chuck the dog led the way. He’s a silly little guy who thinks he’s king of the world. The moment we stepped outside he disappeared. It was so abrupt and ridiculous that we just stopped and froze. He was walking three feet in front of us with the confident waggle dachshunds have. From one moment to the next he was gone—
zoop!

  George took a step forward and said uncertainly, “Chuck?”

  The yard was small and well kept. There wasn’t a place he could have gone without being seen. But George still hurried to a far corner and, bending way down, searched the grounds.

  My cell phone rang. Instinctively I knew something else was wrong.

  “Chief?” Bill Pegg’s deep voice came through, completely wired.

  “Yeah?”

  “The Schiavo house is on fire. It’s a meltdown. Somebody had to’ve set it. It’s going up like gasoline.”

  “I’m on my way.” George scurried around uselessly looking for the dog. I flicked off the phone and called out to him. “Forget it. Whoever disappeared him is playing with us. You won’t find him now.”

  He glared at me. “Don’t say that!”

  “He’s gone. Come with me. Someone set fire to the Schiavo house. Everything is connecting up, George. He might even be over there.”

  Eyes closed, he shook his head. “No, I have to stay. He might be here somewhere.”

  I went over and took his arm. “The minute we’re going to dig up Old Vertue I hear the Schiavo house is on fire. Is that a coincidence? You don’t think somebody’s messing with our heads? We’re not supposed to do this now.”

  “Maybe we are. Maybe that’s exactly what you’re supposed to do, Frannie! Dig up your dog right now.”

  I stopped and realized he might be right. But what was I supposed to do? The chief of police has to be where there’s trouble. At that moment trouble was burning five blocks away. “Look, I gotta go over there now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He looked frantically around. “What’s happening, Frannie? What’s going on?”

  “I’m going to find out.”

  “Ooh, baby, baby, you fucked up this time!” The boy stood on the burning deck… or rather this familiar boy stood in front of the burning Schiavo house, his back to the fire, hands in pockets. Next to him was a black man of indeterminate age. Neither paid any attention to the blaze. They seemed intent on watching me approach.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.