“Your brother?” Wimmers said.
“Yes, my brother,” Shea said sadly. “Who do you think’s been setting those fires?”
4
The middle of a vast, calm sea on a sun-golden day on a sun-golden ship. The destination was Atlantis or some other fabled land where they would know peace and security and love for the rest of their lives, where their children would prosper, and their children’s children, and all would meet again in the sunny, leafy paradise that lies just beyond death.
The sound of a distant siren woke Jim Shea.
The dream vanished. The perfect dream.
Sway and jerk of moored boat. Stink of river water. Voices up on the dock. At day’s end everybody with a houseboat here descended on this place. One of the last few warm days before harsh prairie winter. Most of them didn’t even take their boats out. Just hauled out the aluminum tube chairs and sat there on Ellis landing listening to the Cubbies on the radio and laughing well into the work night. It was a pretty democratic place, the houseboat marina. You had lawyers talking with guys who worked on the line at Rockwell, doctors talking to guys who sold electronics stuff at Best Buys.
The boat belonged to Ella. It’d been her Dad’s. She’d inherited it when he died a few years back. Jim kept the curtains closed. They had as little to do with their neighbors as possible. Couple months back a few of the kids who belonged to a houseboat down the way laughed at Ella. Saw her face and laughed at her. She stayed in the houseboat bed for four days. Kept the place totally dark. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t even talk. Just kept herself unconscious with sleeping pills. Finally, he forced her to take a shower and eat the oatmeal and toast and strawberry jam he’d fixed for her. She couldn’t take it when people laughed at her. Unlike Jim, Ella had never had any practice at being ugly, at being the outsider. Indeed, she’d always been the beauty. Cheerleader. Homecoming queen at Regis. Prime U of Iowa heartbreaker. Two rich husbands, both of whom had begged her to stay. And then a year-and-a-half ago when her rich friend (and possible husband #3) had been all coked up and accidentally smashed his big-ass Caddy convertible into a bridge abutment north of Iowa City, her life changed. How it changed. He’d died instantly. The seat belt had saved her life but hadn’t done anything for her face. She’d gone through the windshield. Nearly a thousand stitches in her head and face. You ever see anybody with a thousand stitches in her head and face? We’re talking your basic Frankenstein’s monster here. The face now a series of slightly puffy sewn pockets, angled scars, red remnants of stitching. Snickers from little kids. Gasps from adults. She stayed in bed a lot. A lot. They were supposed to fly to Houston next month — there was a plastic surgeon there who’d developed some new techniques he thought might possible help her — but in the meantime Jim was still trying to get her to resume something like a normal life.
You’re beautiful to me, Ella. That’s all that matters.
You know, I don’t even notice the scars any more, Ella. I really don’t.
Don’t worry, Ella. I’m paying them back. Every one of them.
These were the things he said to her over and over here in the course of their dark houseboat days.
He lived for that gentle drifting time after they made love and just held each other. Complete peace. The golden ship on the ancient sea, drifting toward Atlantis, just the two of them.
He wanted to be thinking of Atlantis right now — even awake he could sometimes conjure up that ship and that sea — but instead all he could think of was the missing gas can and that stack of Cedar Rapids Gazettes he’d kept about the fires he’d set. Somebody had gotten into the trunk of his car and taken them. He wondered who. He wondered why.
Four days ago, it had been. Opened the trunk to put some groceries in and — gone. He hadn’t told Ella, of course. She didn’t need any more grief. It was up to him to find out what was going on here. But how to start? Who to suspect?
He wanted to be one of them, one of the children running along the dock outside, laughing and having a good time. He wanted that for Ella, too. God, if only this Houston surgeon could do what he said he could do.
He eased himself off the bed, not wanting to wake her. He had a lot to do tonight. Time to visit the fourth and final dance club. Now, he’d have to buy a new can and fill it with gasoline. He’d also have to scope the place out. There were sure to be extra cops posted around clubs these days. He might even have to wait a few days until the story faded from the headlines. He’d just have to see.
5
Matt, Jim’s older brother said, “It was pretty funny to us — to me and Mom and Dad, I mean — for a while anyway. We lived in this real bad part of town and this really beautiful little girl named Ella Casey moved in down the street and Jim — he and Ella were both in sixth grade at the time — it changed his whole life. He was obsessed with her right from the start. And he didn’t care who knew it, either. I mean, you know how boys don’t like you to know that they’ve got a crush on somebody? He’d come right out and tell you. I can still hear him sitting in the kitchen with Mom after school, talking about all his plans for when he and Ella got married. Mom tried to help him with it — tried to make him see that she was just too, you know, beautiful for him, I mean, Jim isn’t a handsome guy, I got the looks and he got the brains our Dad always said — but he didn’t listen. He got this paper route and he spent all the money he earned from it on Ella. He was always buying her stuff. She’d take the stuff but she’d never go to a movie with him or go for a walk with him or anything. She was so beautiful, she’s in ninth grade and she’s got senior boys literally fighting over her. She was the fucking trophy, man. She was the trophy. And Jim was always there for her. Always. She’d invite him over when she was depressed or didn’t know which boyfriend to choose or had some errand she needed run. And, man, he’d do whatever she wanted. He was like her shrink and her servant rolled into one. We thought maybe once he got out of high school, maybe one of them would go away to college. But Jim stayed here and went to the community college and she stayed in town and married this rich kid two days after she got out of high school. Eloped, because the kid’s parents were against it. (Grinning) They were part of the Cedar Rapids jet set, you know what I’m saying? and they just didn’t want their very special little boy laying it to white trash every night. All the time they were married, poor Jim was her confidante. She was always calling him, crying and bitching about how unhappy she was. He got so caught up in her problems, he dropped out of school. He lived at home so all he’d have to have was a part-time job. He wanted to be there when Ella needed him. Finally, Ella couldn’t handle the rich boy’s family any more, so she divorced him and got a very nice settlement out of it.
“That’s when she first started hitting the bars and the clubs. She’d never really done that before. Hadn’t had to. But she was mid-twenties now and starting to slip, looks-wise, just a little. Still very, very sexy, but not the new kid on the block any more, either. She becomes the queen of the local clubs. Guys literally line up along the bar to talk to her. Only the best clubs, only the best guys, young lawyers and young docs and young investment bankers, guys like that.
“She ends up finding hubby number two in a club. Advertising guy who’d just sold his agency to a bigger shop out of Chicago. Plenty of cash and recently divorced. Mid-forties. Real fading ass-bandit type. But with pretensions. Guys like him used to get involved in charities so they could show everybody how cool they were. This decade, they dabble in the so-called arts. Local art museum board. Symphony board. Reading endowments for the underprivileged. Previous wife had been big in the Junior League so he’s connected that way, too. And our little Ella is really taken in by all this. She thinks it’s very sophisticated and elegant and all. She asks Jim — she’s told her husband that Jim is gay, you know how a lot of women have male gay friends, and this fits right in with hubby’s image of himself, the local New Yorker-type is how he sees himself, tells him Jim’s gay even though he’s not because this is the easiest way to explain the friendship — she asks Jim to start giving her some background on all the great painters and composers and like that. And he does, of course. And that’s how things go for a few years until she starts having this thing with this college kid who buses dishes out at the club. Everybody in the club knows this is happening except her husband. She’s one of those women who doesn’t hit thirty well. The rich ones head to the plastic surgeons; the poor ones just have affairs. Ella does both. And then the new husband finds out and dumps her. He’s cheated on every woman he’s ever known but the one time he’s the cheatee, his ego absolutely can’t handle it. He gives her a lot of money on the condition that she gets out of his life immediately, which she does. But she’s already sick of the college boy, even though he’s real serious about her.