Bad Things

‘Scott, sweetie,’ she says instead, with commendable evenness. ‘What are you doing?’

The man is starting to relax, a little. Their son's whereabouts are now known, after all. Even if he fell, he can swim. But other parts of the man's soul, held closer to his core, are twisted up and clamping tighter with each second that passes. Why is Scott not responding? Why is he just standing there?

The low panic the man feels has little to do with questions even such as these, however. It is merely present, in his guts, as if that soft breeze followed him down off the deck and through the woods, and has now grabbed his stomach like a fist, squeezing harder and harder. He thinks he can smell something now, too, as if a bubble of gas has come up to the surface of the water, releasing something dark and rich and sweet. He takes another step down the jetty.

‘Scott,’ he says, firmly. ‘It's okay if you want to look in the lake. But take a step back, yeah?’

The man is relieved when his son does just that.

The boy takes a pace backward, and finally turns. He does this in several small steps, as if confused to find himself where he is, and taking ostensive care.

There is something wrong with the boy's face.

It takes his father a moment to realize that it's not physical, rather that the expression on it is one he has never seen there before. A kind of confusion, of utter dislocation. ‘Scott – what's wrong?’

The boy's face clears, and he looks up at his father.

‘Daddy?’ he says, as if very surprised. ‘Why…’

‘Yes, of course, it's Daddy,’ the man says. He starts to walk slowly toward Scott, the hairs rising on the back of his neck, though the temperature around the lake seems to have jumped twenty degrees. ‘Look, I don't know what—’

But then the boy's mouth slowly opens, as he stares past or through his father, back toward the end of the jetty, at the woods. The look is so direct that his mother turns to glance back that way too, not knowing what to expect.

‘No,’ the boy says. ‘No.’

The first time he says it quietly. The second time is far louder. His expression changes again, too, in a way both parents will remember for the rest of their lives, turning in a moment from a face they know better than their own to a mask of dismay and heartbreak that is horrifying to see on a child.

‘What's …’

And then he shouts. ‘Run, Daddy. Run!’

The man starts to run toward him. He can hear his wife running too. But the boy topples sideways before they can get to him, falling awkwardly over the deck and flipping with slow grace down into the water.

The man is on the jetty in the last of the afternoon light. He stands with his child in his arms.

The police are there. A young one, and an older one, soon followed by many more. Four hours later the coroner will tell the police, and then the parents, that it was not the fall into the water, nor to the deck, nor even anything before that, that did it.

The boy just died.

Part 1 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)

It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of outrageous stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion.

Richard Brautigan

An Unfortunate Woman

Chapter 1 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)

Ted came and found me a little after seven. I was behind the bar, assisting with a backlog of beer orders for the patrons out on deck while they waited to be seated. The Pelican's seasonal drinks station is tiny, an area in front of an opening in the wall through to the outside, and Mazy and I were moving around it with the grace of two old farts trying to reverse mobile homes into the same parking space. There's barely room for one, let alone two, but though Mazy is cute and cool and has as many piercings and tattoos as any young person could wish for, she's a little slow when it comes to grinding out margaritas and cold Budweisers and Diet Cokes, extra ice, no lime. I don't know what it is about the ocean, and sand, but it makes people want margaritas. Even in Oregon, in September.

‘Can't get hold of the little asshole,’ Ted muttered. His face was red and hot, and thinning grey hair was sticking to his pate, though the air conditioning was working just fine. ‘You mind?’

‘No problem,’ I said.

I finished the order I was on and then headed through the main area of the restaurant, where old John Prine songs played quietly in the background and the ocean looked grey and cool through the big windows and it felt like Marion Beach always does.

The day had been unusually warm for the season but cut with a breeze from the southeast, and most of the patrons were hazy-eyed rather than bedraggled. Now that the sun was down the air had grown heavy, however, and I'd been glad to be waiting tables instead of hanging tough in front of the pizza oven, which is where I was now headed.

The oven is a relatively new addition at the Pelican, just installed when I started there nine months ago. It had controversially replaced a prime block of seating where customers had been accustomed to sitting themselves in front of seafood for nearly thirty years, and I knew Ted still lost sleep trying to calculate whether the cost of a wood-fired oven and the associated loss of twelve covers (multiplied by two or three sittings, on a good night) would soon, or ever, be outstripped by gains accruing from the fact you can sell a pizza to any child in America, whereas they can be notoriously picky with fish. His wife thought he'd got it wrong but she believed that about everything he did, so while he respected her opinion he wasn't prepared to take it as the final word. Ted is a decent guy but how he's managed to stay afloat in the restaurant business for so long is a mystery. A rambling shack overhanging the shallow and reedy water of a creek that wanders out to the sea – and tricked up inside with dusty nets, plastic buoys, and far more than one wooden representation of the seabird from which it takes its name – the Pelican has now bypassed fashion so conclusively as to become one of those places you go back to because you went there when you were a kid, or when the kids were young or, well, just because you do. And, to be fair, the food is actually pretty good.

I could have done the pizza math for Ted but it was not my place to do so. It wasn't my place to make the damned things, either, but over the last five months I'd sometimes wound up covering the station when Kyle, the official thin-base supremo, didn't make it in for the evening shift. Kyle is twenty-two and shacked up with Becki, the owner's youngest daughter (of five), a girl who went to a barely accredited college down in California to learn some strain of Human Resources bullshit but dropped out so fast that she bounced. She wound up back home not doing much except partying and smoking dope on the beach with a boyfriend who made pizza badly – the actual dough being forged by one of the back-room Ecuadorians in the morning – and couldn't even get his shit together to do that six nights a week. This drove Ted so insane that he couldn't even think about it (much less address the problem practically), and so Kyle was basically a fixture, regardless of how searching his exploration of the outer limits of being a pointless good-looking prick.

If he hadn't shown up by the time someone wanted pizza then I'd do the dough-spinning on his behalf, the other wait staff picking up the slack on the floor. I didn't mind. I'd found that I enjoyed smoothing the tomato sauce in meditative circles, judiciously adding mozzarella and basil and chunks of pepperoni or crayfish or pesto chicken, then hefting the peel to slide them toward the wood fire. I didn't emulate Kyle's policy of adding other ingredients at random – allegedly a form of ‘art’ (which he'd studied for about a week, at a place where they'll accept dogs if they bring the tuition fees), more likely a legacy of being stoned 24/7 – but stuck to the toppings as described, and so the response from the tables tended to be positive. My pizzas were more circular than Kyle's too, but that wasn't the point either. He was Kyle, the pizza guy. I was John, the waiter guy.

Not even the waiter, in fact, just a waiter, amongst several. Indefinite article man.

And that's alright by me.

Wonderboy finally rolled up an hour later, delivered in an open-top car that fishtailed around the lot and then disappeared again in a cloud of dust. He went to the locker room to change, and came out twitching.

‘Glad you could make it,’ I said, taking off the special pizza apron. I didn't care one way or the other about Kyle being late. I was merely following form. You don't let fellow toilers at the bottom of the food-production chain get away with any shit, or they'll be doing it all the time.

‘Yeah, well,’ he said, confused. ‘You know, like, it's my job.’

I didn't have an answer to that, so stepped out of his way and went back to waiting tables. I established what people wanted, and pushed the specials. I conveyed orders back to the kitchen, instigating the production of breaded shrimp and grilled swordfish and blackened mahi mahi, and the celebrated side salad with honey apple vinaigrette. I brought the results back to the table, along with drinks and bonhomie. I returned twice to check that everything was okay, and refresh their iced water. I accepted payment via cash, cheque, or credit card, and reciprocated with little mints and a postcard of the restaurant. I told people it had been great seeing them, and to drive safe, and wiped the table down in preparation for the next family or young couple or trio of wizened oldsters celebrating sixty years of mutual dislike.

After two cycles of this, the evening ended and we cleared the place up, and everyone started for home.

It was dark by then. Unusually humid too, the air like the breath of a big, hot dog who'd been drinking sea water all afternoon. I nodded goodbye as rusty cars piloted by other staff crunkled past me, on the way up the pebbled slip road from the Pelican's location, to turn left or right along Highway 101.

The cooks left jammed together into one low-slung and battered station wagon, the driver giving me a pro-forma eye-fuck as he passed. I assumed they all boarded together in some house up in Astoria or Seaside, saving money to send back home, but as I'd never spoken to any of them, I didn't actually know.

As I reached the highway I realized Kyle was a few yards behind me. I glanced back, surprised.

‘You walking somewhere?’

‘Yeah, right,’ he smirked. ‘Mission control's on the way. Big party up the road tonight. We're headed in your direction, if you want a ride.’

I hesitated. Normally I walked the two miles north. The other staff know this, and think I'm out of my mind. I look at their young, hopeful faces and consider asking what else I should be doing with the time, but I don't want to freak them out. I don't want to think of myself as not-young, either, but as a thirty-five year old amongst humans with training wheels, you can feel like the go-to guy for insider information on the formation of the tectonic plates.

The walk is pleasant enough. You head along the verge, the road on your right, the other side of which is twenty feet of scrubby grass and then rocky outcrops. On your left you pass the parking lots of very small, retro-style condos and resorts, three storey at most and rendered in pastel or white with accents in a variety of blues, called things like The Sandpiper and Waves and Trade Winds; or fifty-yard lots stretching to individual beach houses; or, for long stretches, just undergrowth and dunes.

But tonight my feet were tired and I wanted to be home, plus there's a difference between doing your own thing and merely looking unfriendly and perverse.

‘That'd be great,’ I said.

Chapter 2 (#u19b0b265-81c9-5c54-a1ba-67e1bf1bf5f2)