Terminal Island (15 page)

“I really can’t. All that walking loosened me up—I have to run. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Where do you think you’re gonna go? Everything’s closed.”

Over her shoulder, she said, “The public toilets on the pier.” She was right: the beach restrooms were always open—they didn’t even have doors.

“Hurry back,” Henry called anxiously, watching her hustle down the path. She tossed him a perfunctory wave and was gone.

He shuffled around, hands in his pockets, humming tunelessly as he scanned the seas for their ship. It should be appearing any time now. From nervousness or the power of suggestion, he began to feel that he also had to go to the bathroom.

Fidgeting a few minutes more, pacing around in front of the ticket window, Henry decided he had to at least look for a place to pee before other travelers started showing up and he lost his chance.

The ferry landing was a wide, paved platform jutting out over the ocean, exposed on all sides. Since there was no one in sight, Henry thought of relieving himself right there in broad daylight, but he was too self-conscious for that—what if someone he couldn’t see was watching from town, or from those mansions on the hills? It wasn’t so farfetched; there were even coin-operated telescopes over by the Casino.

He circled the ticket kiosk. At the rear of the landing was a deck of slippery steel grates, below which the sloshing of waves could be heard and dimly seen, spooky as a subterranean lake. Standing there, Henry was more or less hidden, shielded by the terminal building, and with the added novelty of peeing directly into the sea. He was facing the direction of Lover’s Cove, but there was no one there. The only thing was he didn’t like being out of sight of the luggage—it would have to be quick.

He had just opened his fly and started to go when he sensed movement in his periphery: a blob of bright color. His pee stream cut off like a snipped string and he stuffed himself back in his pants, jerking his head around to see.

But he already knew—some part of him had been expecting it.

It was them. All of them, forming a semicircle around him, with Lisa at the center. Henry was surrounded by lollipop-colored girls, with no way to escape except over the edge of the landing: a twenty-foot drop to the sea, into water that was deep and clear and freezing cold. He could see Garibaldi perch like bright orange flames in the depths.

In the face of having his worst nightmare realized, Henry was unexpectedly devoid of terror. Years later he would wonder if it was the primordial survival reflex of the cornered animal, something deep in the organism realizing it was too late for fear, too far gone for flight. Or perhaps he was simply relieved to face the demons that had haunted him all these days and nights. The weariness of it. Whatever, he was suddenly almost amused; a fascinated bystander at his own execution.

“Now wait a second,” he said, instinctively holding up his hands as he had seen cops do on television when they were trying to calm desperate criminals. For this was as unreal as anything on TV—more so. “Stop playing around. This has gone far enough. You’re gonna get in trouble. I mean it.” His voice sounded high and brittle, foil-thin.

The girls weren’t hearing him. As at the playground, they stared at Henry with the erotic malevolence of carnivores, practically licking their lips. Their shiny plastic raincoats crackled as they moved. And now Henry noticed there was something odd about the way they were holding their closed umbrellas, gripping them two-handed as if they were baseball bats. Even odder were the umbrellas themselves: As Henry watched in disbelief, the girls gloatingly peeled off their colorful fabric sheaths to reveal sharp little swords.

Advancing on him, Lisa said, “Dibs on his heart.”

Henry jumped off the wharf.

There was a brief instant of heart-in-mouth falling, then he plunged deep into salty icewater. It went up his nose, flooded all his senses and his clothes, and Henry clawed his way back to the surface like a man trying to escape from a grave in which he has been buried alive.

He came up in shadow, in the darkness beneath the landing. It was loud under there with the slopping of waves, and rough—he was being lifted and dunked and dragged back and forth. Trying to get a breath, he inhaled water and was banged hard against a barnacled concrete piling—only his clothes saved him from being too badly gashed. He knew that if he didn’t get out of there, he would soon be ground to a pulp against the pilings or the rocks. There were also the threats he couldn’t see: snarls of lost fishing-line and rusty hooks, venomous black sea-urchins, moray eels, and God knew what else lurking in the abyss below his flailing legs. Sharks.

Above him, Henry caught watery-eyed glimpses of the girls atop the metal grating—some on hands and knees, peering down. Snippets of their shrill babble filtered through to him:
“Keep looking!”
“I
am
!”
He could see them silhouetted against the sky, but he knew from standing up there that it was much harder for them to see him. As long as he didn’t reveal himself or make a sound, they might give up and go away. But if he stayed under there much longer he would be dead—the first really big wave would smash him like a bug.

It was so cold he could barely think, but Henry decided his only chance was to stay out of sight and work his way to the shallows. If he couldn’t stand up soon he was going to drown in his heavy clothes. He knew that there was a boat ramp close inshore, a concrete slope back up to the landing, slick with green algae—he could only hope the girls would be gone by the time he reached it. The waves were pushing him that way anyway; there wasn’t much he could do. Henry let himself be carried, drifting feet-first to fend off any obstacles, never so grateful to be wearing shoes.

For a while he wasn’t sure he was going to make it. A number of times waves picked him up and hurled him into the pilings and jumbled boulders that made up the foundation of the landing, then painfully dragged him off again. It was a gauntlet of rough and slippery impacts. While in this deeply-shadowed grotto, he also ran into softer masses: sea anemones and sponges like limply-caressing hands, rubbery vines and flaps of kelp that threatened to entangle him…and something else.

What happened next is only recalled in Henry’s worst nightmares:

Swimming in the webbed green half-light of an undersea grotto, feet dragging over rocks, with tendrils of slimy brown kelp pulling you down and freezing saltwater sloshing over your head, you try to stay afloat. The back wall rises before you—the base of the ferry terminal. Veins of wiggly luminescence play across the underside of its bellied surface, an artificially sculpted surface: Weird, fleshy folds cut in wet rock that seem to heave and shift in the submarine twilight.

Eyes. Immense bulging eyes laughing malevolently out of a giant stone face half-submerged in the sea. It is at least twenty feet wide, crudely chopped out of native bedrock and faced with a living, scuttling mosaic of black and red and green rock crabs, seething like lice in the furrows.

The uneven, rough-hewn quality of the sculpture gives it the freakishness of a portrait drawn by a schizophrenic. It looks alive—the face’s grotesque expression of maniacal, devouring glee exerts a power that stops the heart, shuts down the mind, robs the body of any residual warmth. It roars—a thick, vomitous gurgle emanating from its hugely laughing/screaming mouth as water covers and uncovers it, that gulping maw seeming to want to suck you in.

Unwillingly driven into that bellowing orifice, you come up against a barrier of thickly-rusted iron bars and hang on for dear life as wave-surge swamps your head and sluggishly retreats.

A hand slinks through the bars, long fingers clamping around the back of your neck. Pinning you in place. “Did you draw the short straw, sonnyboy?” rasps a voice from within that dark, gated crevice. “Did you lay bets on whether I was dead?”

Chin-deep in swirling foam, your face is pressed tight against the bars, staring eye to eye with a vision of horror more incredible than anything in your wildest dreams: a bleach-faced living corpse, gelatinous skin sloughing off like wet tissue-paper, nose a purplish crater, salt-crusted hair coming out in clumps. It stinks like rotting fish—you can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Only its shining eyes seem fully alive, red-rimmed and bloodshot and bugging out of its head with wild intensity.

“Stay with me, now,” its reeking, toothless open sore of a mouth beseeches. “If you stay with me I can keep you warm, snuggling in my heart of stone, on a bed of soft moss! Eternal night of glory! Learn the gift of holy prophesy as it was taught to me, and to the unbroken line of all who came before! Do it! There is no choice! If you deny this honor—death! A plague upon you and all you love! Stay with meeee—”

The water covers you up again, and the rush of air escaping from the cave gives you a bare advantage over that clutching horror. You kick away, breaking free and not stopping until you are on dry land. By then you barely remember what you saw down there—all that is left is the fading aura of dread after waking from a fever.

His mind blank, Henry was suddenly fleeing, thrashing for his life away from something so fearful it shook him out of his exhaustion and cold and growing acquiescence to just let go, to give in and sink. So horrible that he screamed and screamed, unable to stop though it gave him away and opened his throat to the waves, the screaming broken only by croaks of regurgitated seawater.

The next thing Henry clearly remembered was hearing a familiar sound, so loud and powerful that it penetrated even this place and broke through his terror:

BWAAAAAAAAAAA!

It was the horn of the ferryboat.

Careless of the girls—the girls all but forgotten—Henry dragged himself the last of the way in a blind rush, emerging back in daylight and slogging up the slippery ramp to the platform, using starfish as handholds. Lisa and her minions were nowhere to be seen.

He found his mother in fevered consultation with the ticket authorities, who were on the phone to the police. As soon as they saw him coming around the corner, they apologized and hung up, tapping her and saying, “Is that him?” indicating Henry’s pitiful, bedraggled form. Vicki cried out at the sight of him.

“Henry! Where have you been, oh my God! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Sorry, Mom,” he said dully.

“You had me so worried!” She clutched him tightly, weeping with relief. “I came back and couldn’t find you! Where were you? What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh my God, did you fall in the water or something? Why are you all wet?”

“I fell in the water. It was an accident.”

“Oh no! Oh, honey! Are you all right?”

Henry nodded sluggishly. Looking the gleaming white ferryboat, he asked, “Is it time to go?”

“Are you all right? You’re hurt! Shouldn’t we take you to the doctor?”

“No, I want to just go.”

“Are you sure? Oh, honey, I was so scared…”

“Yes, let’s go.” It required an extreme effort to focus, to crawl out of the depths of his shock and meet her frantic eyes. “Let’s go now, Mom.”

“But you—”

“I want to go now. Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

They boarded the boat.

PART II:
ANGEL’S TRUMPET

Chapter Seventeen

WAR DOGS

“Y
ou don’t have to come with me,” he says, tying his shoes.

“Of course I’m coming with you,” Ruby says. “I just don’t know what you’re hoping to accomplish up there.”

“One way or another I’m going to put an end to this crap. This has gone on long enough. I have a right to see my own mother—I owe it to her. Do you realize she turned down a dream job here because of me? Because of my girl problems? It’s totally because of me we moved away, and she’s probably spent the last thirty years feeling like she was kicked out of Paradise and wishing she could come back. Well, she finally got her chance, and now it’s my responsibility if she’s in trouble.”

“How so?”

“Because she got me out when I needed her to. Do you see what I’m saying? It’s come full circle.”

Henry didn’t say what else he had been thinking: that the island had frightened him off once before, had pried open his head and taken root in his nightmares, and he wasn’t going to let it happen again. He wasn’t a little boy any more.

“Do you intend to climb the fence, or what?”

“I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but something.”

“Well, I’m not bringing Moxie up there again—it’s too hard for me to film and watch her at the same time. We better see if that desk-girl can take her.” Ruby digs the card out of her purse. “Janet Bixby—‘Bix Bee Childcare.’”

Henry is a little surprised to hear her say this, but he’s not about to argue. “Fine, whatever.”

They go down to the lobby and are introduced to a cheerful, spry old lady in Reeboks who shows them the child-friendly back room where she and Moxie will be playing and doing activities. “Looks cozy,” Ruby says. “I like that there’s no television.” Henry agrees; the place has a warm, homey feel, with plastic tubs of well-chewed toys and books, but the main selling point is the enthusiasm of the caregiver, Mrs. Bixby.

Even as Moxie starts to protest their leaving, the old lady flashes a mouthful of enormous white dentures and says, “Now, you guys don’t worry about a thing. I’ve raised ten beautiful children, and I guarantee that by the time you come back, Moxie and I are gonna be bosom buddies. She’ll be begging to stay, mark my words. Does she have any allergies? Because we’re gonna bake cookies, yes we are!”

A few minutes later Henry and Ruby are free as birds. “Jesus, we should have done this a long time ago,” Ruby says, blinking in the daylight. “I feel like I just got out of solitary confinement.”

“It’s true,” Henry says. “I feel a hundred pounds lighter.”

Without any support network or so much as a babysitter, they’ve hardly had a minute to themselves since Moxie was born. It was so hard at the infant stage that they quickly fell into a combat mindset that tolerated hardships like the lack of a sex life or time alone together as acceptable losses; they were focusing on the essentials, their every waking second devoted to either work or the baby. Hardheads both, they took it as a challenge, and even as things have gotten incrementally easier they’ve kept to this regimen, though there are signs of fraying at the edges: In the last year, Henry has begun sneaking out to strip clubs and bars, and Ruby has begun taking an inordinate interest in yoga. Where they had once been able to talk for hours, their divergent interests have begun making them much more private, internal people. Their orbits have separated. This is upsetting in its way, but easily chalked up to the inevitable cooling that all marriages must undergo. It doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.