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At sunset, waves change
from unruly cotton-tops to loping gazelles. On the ocean side of a peninsula
dividing the bay from the sea, a three foot wave crests and breaks in
a slow curve, then spits a layer of foam onto the beach where sanderlings
dart like children at play. Just off the Southern California coast,
Catalina Island balloons out of the sea, as it does whenever Santa Ana
winds vacuum the atmosphere. These desert winds blow cold in December,
especially at sunset, chilling the summer-clad people who linger along
the sandstone bluff to watch the sun settle into the crotch of Catalina.
A block in from the
bluff, a handsome set of cream stucco buildings forms a quadrangle.
One of them is a domed gymnasium brimming now with the electric energy
of youth. Just as the fuzz-ball sun drops, the final whistle blows on
a basketball game, and a hydrant-flow of cheering students gushes over
the quad and into the parking lots.
Soon a dark silence
covers the grounds.
One lone figure hastens
across campus, his large frame bent forward into the wind, unbuttoned
brown suitcoat whipping his wrists. His clothes, privately tailored,
droop on him like ready-mades from Cosco. He wears what his mother or
wife dictates. His thinning hair, limp and rumpled, matches his suit
and his dark brown eyes. "Santa Claus must have delivered those eyes
as coals," his son once said.
Despite a slight paunch,
his prominent jaw and wide shoulders create an aura-one that could easily
protect him from assailants in any bar in the world. But he doesn't
like bars. Too dark.
He does like basketball.
A streetlight illumines
his B.M.W., a car too small to accommodate his body, too trendy to satisfy
his spirit. Since it was a gift from his mother on his forty-fifth birthday,
he tries to appreciate it.
Whistling an Australian
folksong, he drives a mile on Pacific Coast Highway, turns left, and
floats up the hill to his house.
No one is home except
their yellow cat curled up on the kitchen counter beside a frozen turkey
dinner and a note from his wife. He sits at the table and stares for
a while, his mind so vacant it doesn't know it's resting. Feeding the
cat, he notices the date on the calendar and smacks his forehead. "Today's
Jason's birthday," he says, hurrying to the telephone to find out where
the birthday boy might be celebrating.
Two hours later he prowls
the high school grounds looking for that curly-headed boy he has come
to love this summer as if he were his own son. Giving up his search,
he unlocks the door to the gym and slips inside, moving with the grace
of a much smaller man. He flips on a switch that lights the left bleachers.
In the semi-darkness he picks up an imaginary ball, rolls it up his
arm, then begins dribbling back and forth across the highly varnished
hardwood.
Shoes squeaking as he
dribbles, the man approaches the free-throw line in the shadowed home
team's end of the gym. As he stretches for an imaginary lay-up, he looks
up at the basket, then stops, frozen. The body of a boy in a maroon
basketball uniform dangles by a rope from the brace of the hoop. A drafting
stool lies on its side nearby with a red basketball caught in its legs.
The man lunges forward,
touches the boy's leg. He knows who it is. Quickly righting the stool
he climbs up to loosen the rope. When he sees the boy's distorted face,
he howls like a wounded wolf. The sound echoes in the empty gym.
He jumps down and groans,
"Oh, no, no, no. . . . Why?"
Later, waiting for the
police, he paces the entrance to the gym with clenched fists. Why
did he do it? Why? I should've known. Should've seen through him in
Australia. Should've seen him . . . as he saw me.
He pounds his fist into
the heavy door. I'll find out why if it takes me the rest of my life
. . . no matter what it costs me.
Copyright © 2009 Evelyn Cole, All Rights Reserved