Джон Краули - New Haven Noir

I gave her Frank’s number and she called him, but he didn’t pick up. She left a message asking him to phone her, as I had.

I didn’t tell Diane I intended to drive back to the park. It was still raining. There was traffic on the Q-Bridge and then it took me a long time to drive through the neighborhood that bordered the Sound. Everything seemed deserted when I parked in the lot where the bus had been. It wasn’t dark yet. Frank’s truck remained in the other parking lot, the trailer behind it, still without the boat.

I pulled up the hood of my windbreaker and set off toward the pavilion, the lighthouse, and the shore. The rain obscured the buildings across the harbor. The wind was stronger than before. As I approached the top of the slope above the water, I saw the boat rocking in the same place. I took out my phone and called Frank again, and while it was ringing, I caught sight of him. He was on the shore, at a distance, head down, in a raincoat I didn’t remember. It must have been in the truck. He made slow progress. He was dragging something — something heavy — and then he bent as if to lift it. He laid it on the ground and stopped, bending his knees in a way he sometimes did; he said it relieved the pressure in his back. I didn’t leave a voice mail. Instead I hung up, then used my phone to take a picture of him. But he was too far from me; nothing would show. I stepped back from the edge of the hill.

He had been struggling forward, I saw, for a long time. I didn’t know if the burden he dragged was Gavin. If it was Gavin, I didn’t think Frank would have shot him. Maybe he’d stuffed pills down Gavin’s throat, without water, as he stuffed them down his own, and Gavin was unconscious. Was it that hard to subdue him? And why was Frank walking on the shore, not toward his truck? He stopped again to rest, then dragged whatever it was a few more feet. He was heading toward his boat.

The next time he stopped, I phoned him again, and this time he answered. Frank, I said, what’s going on?

I can’t find him, Frank said. I don’t know why I was so sure. I feel terrible.

I took a few steps back. Should I call the police?

There’s one more place I want to look, Frank said. After that, if I don’t find him, I’ll call the police. You’re at home?

Yes, I said, glancing left and right. I’m at home.

Diane is leaving me voice mails, he said. Call her and tell her what I told you. Tell her not to call the cops.

Okay, I said. I ended the call. Then I dialed 911. I wasn’t coherent but they listened.

I couldn’t have said clearly what I was starting to think. Frank would row out, I guessed. A motor might be heard. He would slide Gavin into the water, and call the police after rowing back to shore. The book Frank would write — Gavin lost forever, just as his doctor’s theories had begun to help him — would be devastating, with details no one could deny about moments in Frank’s office. Throughout the book there would be difficult moments, like the scene I’d witnessed, and the therapist would bravely confront his own limitations. It would end with a sad chapter about the psychologist’s fruitless search, his new understanding — as days passed and the boy was not found: not in the park, not in the surrounding city, nowhere — that life for kids like Gavin is even harder and more unpredictable than he had imagined. A much more exciting book than one about Gavin’s resistance and Frank’s anger.

I hurried toward the park entrance. The rain was heavier now, and I was soaked through, freezing — but I wished I were even more uncomfortable, so as to have something simple to think about, something that could be remedied. The police car came quickly, but it felt as if I waited for a long time. I pointed the way down the gravel drive toward the water.

Yale University

So the last proj I did junior year at Spectrum Cumulus College was with my bud Seymour Chin, who was in Singapore — I was in Podunk, OH. It was a proj in Equality Engineering, required, tough but not so. We picked Toiletry and had scads fun and then did the CGIs, and we thought if the world had these johns and janes it would be equal more, definitely. Remembering now the probs we thought up. “Transgen women can’t go in the women’s jane, hey,” Seymour said. “They’re men actually, they might abuse.”

“Nah,” I said. “They got no interest, yah? What you got to do is keep the lesbians out. They could abuse. They got an interest.”

“Obvi.”

“Ident,” I said. “Run a kit. Ten thousand self-ID’d lesbians amalgamed in half-length pix. Surveillance cams can scan and match in.9 seconds. Match, they get sent to the john.”

“Harsh.”

“Gentle it. Just a few words.” I flashed him words: Please use the adjoining facility .

“I see a problem.”

“Yah?”

“Yah. No one in the john knows you’re a les.”

I pondered. “So if they go in the john men could abuse.”

“Yah.”

So all that was actually utter dumb and from old, but I was on propranolol and Seymour was drooping, four a.m. Singapore, which is five p.m. mytime the day before. Next meet we switched the thinking to unigender, made progress. Can’t remember how we scaled it, but we got PASS on it and that’s what counts.

Then: Spring Break! My first Spring Break, because costs. Fam decided this time to go in on it for me, because PASS. Max lucks!

All over the world, Spring Break time.

Received welcome package in gmail, unzipped it. Nice oldtime fonts. Heyjoe! Great year, yah? Now’s for rest-n-rec, yah? As a fulltime student of Spectrum Cumulus you hereby receive a special invitation to Spring Break at our Grandparent College, “Yale”!

Went on a bit about Yale, this place, the oldness, the motto — Luxe y Vanitas , same as ours — and the many years that SCU.edu/sg and Yale had worked together, and-cetera. Pix and vids, leafy, stony, grassy. This was to be so fun.

Then Seymour Chin checked in. Seymour hates- hates to type like words, so what I got back was a string of emojoes to express. I got the meaning right away.

“Heyjoe, we not on?” I flash.

Seymour has affluenza — nose running, coughing, sick like a dog. (Do dogs get specially sick? Don’t know. Never had one.) Not going to make it, not on day one anyway.

I’m on my own at Yale.

So it used to be I guess that Spring Break was in the you know spring, like March. Everybody left Campus and went to crazy-hot places to party — not like now. But who wants to go to New Haven in March? If not snow, rain, ice, and-cetera. So they do it in June, which was when back then a student would get their diploma. And since there’s nothing else going on there then these days, good time. But they still call it “Spring” Break. Know what? You can actually get a train ride ( take a train, they say) from New York up to New Haven, get off. There’s a Shuffle that meets this train and takes you to Campus. Town is wastrel, but then you drive through this stone portal — like in a fantasy RPG — and there you like are.

Wow. The place is old. The buildings look like castles. Old corroding I guess granite. Pointy windows. Pointy tops. Pointy everything. And what happened just as we drove in and down this avenue? Bells started ringing . They were playing songs, but with bells, somewhere up in a tower. Ancient songs I remember from as a kid. I sort of teared up a little it was so amazing.

We were led through another portal into this big square of lawn, a quad it was called — four sides, get it? — where there were long tables and these young guys and women were waiting to hand us stuff, all of them waving and saying Welcome and Hi and Get in Any Line. The spring-breakers were some of them zonkered with sleeplessness, come from around the world like Seymour Chin did or actually didn’t, others up for it and giving high fives and whatnot. The woman I came up to checked my name/pic on their pad, and started piling things in front of me, calling out the names as they did it. Sheets and stuff! Orientation materials! One six-pack beer! One swechirt (with huge white Y on it)! Goodie bag! Hat!