Pasadena Page 8

  The picnic was ruined. Linda looked to the sky and realized that it was nearly five o’clock and that Edmund and the others would arrive on the beach within the hour. There was no time to climb back to the cottage for her bathing dress. She pulled her clothes over her head and rolled her wool underpants into a ball, and there Linda stood, naked on the beach, her chest goose-pimpling, her hips white and bright in the fading afternoon. During the past few months, much to her regret, she’d begun to develop a sense of modesty. It would shame her deeply were Edmund to see her like this, fleshy and vulnerable. And so, with her lobster satchel around her waist, she pushed forward into the cold March ocean.

  The tide slapped at her shins and her thighs and between her legs, and Linda paddled on, through a bed of bull kelp, the long stalks parting around her. From twenty feet out she could see Condor’s Nest up on the cliff, the tin roofs throwing back the setting sun as if in protest. Edmund, she knew, was in the fields, riding his burro as long as he could before Valencia would make him change his shirt for the picnic. Valencia was in the kitchen, embroidering the blouses she sold at Margarita’s. Charlotte, Linda imagined, was walking toward Condor’s Nest, pulling a notebook from her pocket, ready to record a thought. From this sea view, Linda’s world appeared calm: the three cottages alone on the bluff, ghostly smoke rising from a chimney. It was a world Linda loved more than anything, but she knew it couldn’t contain her; she was sixteen, and she believed she was capable of taking care of herself. She longed for the day.

  Her skin blue and cold beneath the water, Linda propelled herself out to the buoy that marked her underperforming lobster pots and tugged the lines. The pots would be stuffed, she could only hope, with three-year-olds banging their tails. She inhaled and began swimming straight to the bottom of the Pacific, her hand around the pot warp guiding her down. At once everything around her was silent, the water dense and icy and black and touching her everywhere. The pot warp was slick with algae, and her hair fanned around her and she motored onward. On the ocean floor there was just enough light to see a few inches in front of her. The pots nestled against a rock covered with a giant green anemone, its tentacles swaying. Surfgrass and sea lettuce and lime-green dead-man’s-fingers and a giant drooping sea palm waved in her wake, as if welcoming her. The sand was fine and scattered with broken-up buckshot barnacles, and the ocean floor swallowed her feet.

  She inspected two pots and found them disappointingly empty. Nothing in the next two as well. Worry rose in her as she turned to the almost invisible slats of the fifth and sixth pots. Both empty. In only a few years the bottom of the ocean had changed, and if she hadn’t seen it herself she would never have believed it possible; hadn’t Linda once gone around saying that the ocean was so big, no man could change it? In the seventh pot, three lobsters waited inside, and in the eighth one hovered mournfully. These lobsters were almost five pounds each, and one of them was so fat and long it was the biggest she had ever caught after Lottie. It barely fit through the mouth of her satchel, and just as she was tucking its tail into the bag and buttoning the flap, Linda sensed something move at her feet.

  She nearly gasped.

  It could have been a tidepool sculpin or some other bottom-scraper she’d never bother to haul. Near the pots she’d once seen a two-spotted octopus, but when it saw her it had billowed away, a rubbery tablecloth caught in the watery wind. And that was probably what this was, Linda reassured herself, an old two-spotter, with its pear-shaped head and its green-brown skin and its arms sucking mollusks from the rocks. They were the biggest cowards in the Pacific, dashing away at the sight of anything bigger than themselves, and Linda took hold of the pot warp and swam to the surface.

  The light poured from above, green through the water, and now she could see the bottom of the buoy. In another few seconds she would push her head into the daylight, but just as she was about to crack the surface and fill her lungs with air and wipe her hair out of her eyes and turn toward shore—where she’d dress on the beach and then show Edmund the giant lobster—just then, still in the clasp of the ocean, still ten feet under March water, Linda saw the slender snout of a blue shark.

  It was about five feet long, not quite full-size, its pectoral fins extending from its side like two crescent moons. Its belly was white, its back was dark blue, and its two black eyes were sunk deep in the side of its snout, which was now only a few feet from Linda. At first she couldn’t believe it was a shark, because the blues usually didn’t come this close to shore, and she thought that maybe it was a swordfish that had lost its sword, or a large barracuda—so long and skinny it was—but then it opened its mouth and revealed a row of rounded but deadly-looking teeth.

  Linda stopped kicking and floated silently, hanging on to the pot warp. She couldn’t tell if the shark was eyeing her or her lobsters. It was a dark-eyed silent creature, its intentions all mystery, and if Linda hadn’t been so frightened she would have recognized the shark’s sleek, dangerous beauty; she would have pondered the fast fury that ran electrically through its brain. She knew she should try to escape, but she didn’t know how; she was transfixed. She and the shark floated in the ocean, as if suspended from something above, its fins paddling, her lungs aching for air. She thought about the party that was about to arrive on the beach looking for her. A part of her was already resigned to the fact that the shark would devour her, nudging up its snout and flinging open its mouth and snapping those teeth into her thigh, penetrating her flesh. She would release an underwater scream, one that only she and the shark would share, and her blood would seep as slowly as ink clouds, staining the sheets of the ocean. And later, when Edmund arrived on the beach and couldn’t find her, he would shrug his shoulders and say, “Where’d she get to now?” She thought of the story her death would provide Charlotte’s pen: a girl disappeared, stolen away as if by a large, cruel hand. Linda hoped that Charlotte would notice her clothes on the beach and piece together the facts, and Linda wrote the final sentence for Charlotte: “Did Linda Stamp drown, or was she eaten alive?”

  The shark’s eyes were the size of sand dollars, with a gelatinous sheen. They didn’t seem to have eyelids—they were simply two dark, oily disks staring into the still world of the ocean and finding Linda. All of it—her desperate need for air, the winter current, the threat of the mouth curving prehistorically beneath the blue snout—made Linda think of her life at Condor’s Nest, with its surrounding thicket of hottentot figs blooming with yellow flowers; of Dieter, still in Europe, even though the newspaper pinned to Margarita’s bulletin board indicated that peace had arrived and that Wilson himself had gone to France to sweep things up; of Valencia, who had recently pulled Linda aside and told her a few shocking secrets of the world, most of which involved womanhood; of Edmund, her Siegmund, who had recently complained to Valencia that he no longer wanted to sleep in the same cottage as his sister. She thought of them all, but mostly of her brother, his face invading her mind: and she felt the urgency to make a final choice, a choice of devotion, to settle her heart upon one single thing before it was too late. Linda chose Edmund: If I can think of only one, I shall think of you. She wondered what the shark was thinking of, what it—he?—had chosen. And just as she was about to go limp and offer herself, the shark whipped its tail and turned around, its snout leading the long dark hunting way.

  As she broke the surface, Linda was crying and gulping for air. She started for shore; in front of her waited the pitched bedsheet and the bonfire pit and, above, Condor’s Nest. She thought she saw someone moving in the garden on the bluff, but she couldn’t tell who it was. Someone in a white shirt—was it Edmund? Would he believe her when she told him of the blue shark? She could hardly believe it herself—those shallow black eyes the most evil thing she had ever seen! Her satchel was heavy with lobster and water as she paddled on. There’d be time to dry off and rehook the buttons of her dress and run up the bluff to the kitchen to fetch a deep pot. She would pull Edmund aside and describe the snout and the dorsal
fin and how frightened she’d been, and she wanted him to know that he had been in her mind as those teeth gleamed in the dusky water. It was he she’d been thinking about, only Edmund, dear Edmund; everything else had fallen away. And she didn’t care what he would say, didn’t care if this would embarrass him or lead him to call her a stupid girl—because this was the truth, and Linda Stamp had faced a grinning blue shark, and so what if it was little more than a baby, its teeth made Linda’s puma trap look like a nutcracker. She had to tell him, she had to take Edmund’s hand and tell him what really ran through her mind during the moments that mattered most: that she would always think of him first and last, that she was his, and Oh please Edmund tell me that you are mine. She reached the shallows, the waves crashing around her, and she stood, the water reaching her waist. She had made it to shore, and despite her fear she knew that she would return to the ocean floor; either the shark would come for her or it wouldn’t. Linda’s optimism set in, and just as she began to emerge from the water, naked except for her satchel and a stalk of kelp across her shoulders, Linda saw a man appear on the beach, followed by someone else, and Edmund trailing behind.

  “Linda!” her father called. “Is it really you?” He was waving his arms over his pointy head, and he began running toward the water. He was skinnier than she remembered, and his beard was like a bib across his chest and over his green wool jacket.

  Linda stopped, crouching and covering herself in the tide. She waved demurely. Something in her had assumed she’d never see her father again. And something in the expression on Edmund’s face—a face that had turned hard and old as he became a young man—told Linda that he too hadn’t expected to see Dieter again. He’d come to believe that the farm was his, and he’d begun to dig his toes into the windswept land.

  “Come out of the water and give Papa a hug,” Dieter called.

  But between Dieter and Edmund was a stranger, a tall young man in a white shirt that billowed to reveal a patch of black hair on his chest. He held his chin down, and his shoulders hunched against the spray, and his mane of black hair blew about. He followed Dieter to the water’s edge, and when he looked up, Linda, naked in the waves, the lobsters’ antennae tickling her thigh, saw his face: eel-dark eyes, a mouth split apart as if he were about to say something, as if he recognized her, his brow buckled with a worry Linda knew just then she’d forever wonder about.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” Dieter said.

  Behind the stranger hurried Edmund, his cap pushed far back on his head as if he’d been scratching it while figuring something out. He squinted and his face was blank and his glasses slipped down his nose and off his face, and Linda saw that his resemblance to Dieter had magnified. She knew that Edmund was sensing something shift beneath him. The four years of their small world, Edmund and Linda’s tiny circle of a world, had closed upon itself, a locked globe. Then Valencia appeared, and Charlotte Moss with her notepad.

  “I want you to meet Bruder, Linda. He’s made the journey back with me and he’s here to stay. Come out and say hello.”

  But Linda couldn’t come out of the water, not just yet. First she’d have to resign herself to the fact that the interim years of war now belonged to memory—but whose memory? Then she’d have to think about the bag of lobsters and realize that she didn’t have enough for Bruder but would have to offer one to the stranger anyway, and she already knew that she would hand over the largest to the young man, saying something silly like “Doesn’t all that hair get in your eyes?” And then, before she could emerge from the ocean, she’d have to beg her father and her brother and the boy who’d go on to sleep in the bed across from Edmund’s to turn around and allow her to dress in privacy. Upon realizing that she was naked, Dieter and Edmund skittered nervously up the bluff to Condor’s Nest, saying, “We’ll be back, we’ll be back!” But Bruder looked up alertly; his eyebrows lifted and he sealed his lips and he hesitated before he followed the others. The wind flapped the wings of his sleeves, and slowly he left Linda alone on the beach, a glance stolen over his shoulder. And when at last he was gone, Linda ran from the ocean and pulled her dress over her blue cold chest, and she dried as the weak sun set and the salt hardened upon her flesh and turned into bitter crystals in the night.

  4

  Bruder was about nineteen, or maybe twenty—no one knew his birthday for sure. His mother had deposited him as an infant at the Children’s Training Society in an orange crate lined with newsprint. Mrs. Trudi Banning, the long-faced Prussian widow who ran the orphanage, had given him his name. She’d been holding him up to the sun, turning him this way and that, finding the baby strangely large and of a warm, wooden color, when the mailman delivered a perfumed letter from her brother, Luther—a petal-skinned poet to whom Mrs. Banning’s heart was devoted. She was thinking of her brother and holding the new baby, and his name came to the orphanage’s mistress like a chill on the spine.

  Over the years, gossip about the boy traveled on the breeze and Mrs. Banning told Bruder what she knew, and what she speculated to be true: “Your mother was a hotel whore. She was a chambermaid first at the Raymond, but then it burned down, and then at the Hotel Maryland, where she was caught nakt beneath the pergola. Who your father was, I’m sure even she couldn’t say. She was from Mazatlán, your mother, smuggled up the coast, and that is all I know, my lad, but it should be enough to tell you who you are. And what kind of man you are destined to be.” Until the war, Bruder had spent his entire life in Pasadena at the Training Society, and as soon as he was old enough to understand that Mrs. Banning didn’t want him to know how to read anything more complex than the stenciling on the side of a grove box, he walked to the library and found a copy of Kidnapped and began reading about boys in worse straits than himself. He was always big for his age, and black-haired puberty came early, and by the time he was twelve years old and nearly six feet tall, he was easily spotted prowling the streets of Pasadena in a lonely lurch, to the library and back to the orphanage, books clutched in his paw. Rumors about him spread around town—He’s a mutant! He’s the devil’s son! He only pretends to know how to read!—but there wasn’t an invented story or whispered fallacy of which Bruder was unaware. He knew that people called him “El Brunito,” and that they said that the accident with the ice-delivery boy wasn’t an accident at all. He knew he frightened women on Colorado Street, young fragile-wristed ladies whose faces would blanch whiter than their tennis sweaters when his long shadow crossed theirs. He had been born in Pasadena, but there was a segment of society—the 100 Percenters, he knew they called themselves—that ruled the little city in the valley and considered him and everyone like him to be “from somewhere else.” Then, in 1918, Bruder went to war with the Motor Mechanics Co. 17, First Regiment, and he returned with a penny-size burn scar in his brow. He journeyed back to California with Dieter Stamp, the two of them having struck a deal. On the way, Dieter told stories of his youth and his family and his farm at Condor’s Nest, and Bruder, who early in life had learned that he could gain more by listening than by speaking, arrived in Baden-Baden-by-the-Sea in the spring of 1919 knowing everything about Dieter’s daughter, Linda Stamp.

  She shrieked like a spoiled child, he thought, when her father informed her that he had gone to war and never changed his name. “I left Condor’s Nest and I thought: I am not David. It is not who I am. I tried calling myself David, but after a week I gave it up. I am Dieter.” Linda hollered over the betrayal: “It isn’t fair!” It was a cry Bruder would hear again and again during his first days at Condor’s Nest.

  At the supper table one day shortly after Bruder arrived, Linda told her story of the blue shark, exaggerating her courage in the glare of its teeth. “There we were, just me and the shark.” Her account brought fear to her parents’ faces, and to Bruder’s, if not fear, certainly a quiet respect. Linda could see that he was asking himself, What sort of girl is she?—but in fact he was warning himself because he knew exactly what kind of girl she was.

/>   The shark story left Edmund anxious. “I don’t think you should be out fishing by yourself anymore. It’s too dangerous for a girl.”

  Linda turned, barely aware that he was referring to her. “Too dangerous?”

  “You could’ve been killed.”

  “But I can—”

  “Edmund’s right,” Dieter broke in. “Maybe you should stay out of the ocean unless you’re with Bruder.” Over the years Dieter’s beard had grown lacy, a grid of white wire cut and bent like latticework. The years of war had folded twice again the creases in his throat, where his skin bunched up, and he fingered this loose flesh as he ate a shrimp ball.

  “With him?” said Linda. “Does he even know how to swim?”

  “With Bruder?” said Edmund.

  “Of course he knows how to swim.”

  “Does he know how to fish?”

  Her father assured her that he did.

  “Why would we send her out with him?” asked Edmund. But Dieter ignored his son.

  “Do you know how to fish and swim?” Linda asked the young man.

  “No, but you’ll teach me.” And he left the table and climbed down the bluff and stripped to his waist and rolled his trousers up to his knees. Linda followed and watched him from the beach. She doubted he would venture into the ocean without her. She assumed he would be a slow student, requiring months to learn, and something in her looked forward to the many days of him paddling tentatively at her side and heeding her instruction; days when Bruder’s face would float awkwardly in the water; days when he’d be nervous and careful to stay close to her.