I’d just stepped out at nine the next morning to walk to the bank and then to the city garage when two sets of flashing police lights turned off Thompson Avenue. I tensed, thinking they were sheriff’s cars, coming for me.
But when they got closer, I saw they were Rivertown cars, not Bohler’s, and a different worry took hold. The two squad cars were boxing in a silver Dodge Ram window van between them. I knew that van. It was Leo’s.
He passed by, the middle of a tiny parade, staring straight ahead, his arms straight out and tense on the steering wheel.
Sitting beside him on the passenger’s seat, Ma Brumsky stared straight ahead as well. Her face was every bit as rigid as her son’s.
Never since seventh grade had Leo not flashed one of his huge-toothed grins if he was within a mile or so of my eyes. For sure, he couldn’t have missed seeing me standing so close to the curb. Something was wrong.
I ran across the broad lawn that separates city hall from my turret. It had all been my grandfather’s land once but the lizards that ran the town had seized most of the land after he died. They’d seized the enormous pile of limestone he intended for his castle as well and used it to build an enormous city hall of dark hallways and shadowed rooms.
I got around back to the police station door, just as the three vehicles pulled to a stop. The two officers in the rearmost car got out quickly, as though anxious to avoid whatever was coming next. They reached into the back of their car, tugged out huge armloads of wet garments and ran into the front door of the station without a glance at either the van or the leading squad car.
The two officers in the lead car were in no such hurry. They stayed in their car, facing one another. They shook their heads and waved their arms; they were arguing. Finally, they got out and began moving, with zombie-like slowness, back to the Ram van. The younger of them suddenly stepped in front of his more senior partner and reached to open the front passenger door.
The move infuriated the older cop, who shouldered the younger man aside so he could pull open the passenger door himself.
Ma Brumsky began pivoting on the passenger seat slowly because of her arthritis and turned her knees toward the open door. Her hair was damp and she’d wrapped herself in one of the yellowish threadbare towels they set out – rarely washed, just refolded by someone wearing thick gloves – at the health center.
Sliding down from the seat caused the towel to ride up higher on Ma Brumsky’s hips. And as it rose, it became obvious that she was wearing nothing underneath. Mercifully, she paused to yank the towel down before proceeding. And so it went, for a few more minutes and many more tugs, before Ma inched down enough to get her bare feet planted on the sidewalk. Without a glance at anyone, she headed for the police station door, clutching the towel safely around her.
The younger officer, having witnessed this at close range, stood frozen, as if in shock, until the older officer, pressed safely behind the still open front passenger door, yelled at him: ‘Open the damned sliding door!’
The young cop raised a trembling arm, grasped the handle and slid the center door back.
Mrs Roshiska, Ma’s best friend and the woman I’d recently seen cannonballing at the health center, stood bare-legged and bare-footed just inside the opening, hunched like a precision sky diver about to hit the silk. She was older than Ma by at least five years. More relevant that day, she was fifty pounds heavier.
The health-center towel could not completely encircle such girth. The two frayed edges were separated by at least a foot of puckered, white, septuagenarian skin.
Bless the woman; she tried. She tugged both sides of the towel as close together as she could before aiming a bare leg down toward the running board. But then she teetered and had to let go of one edge of the towel to shoot an arm out onto the shoulder of the young officer. The towel fell limp and dangled uselessly in her other hand like a flag drooping on a windless, humid day.
‘No!’ the young cop shouted, desperate to duck out from under the suddenly naked old woman’s hand pressing down hard on his shoulder.
‘She’s turning!’ shouted his more experienced partner, who’d doubtless seen other, perhaps equal, terrors.
And indeed she was. Still maintaining a steel grip on the young cop’s shoulder, Mrs Roshiska grinned at all the eyes on her and released the towel from her other hand, to reach behind her for her walker. Turning back, she dropped the aluminum contraption gently to the ground in front of her, stepped almost daintily down to the pavement and aimed her walker toward the front of the station, covered by nothing but autumnal air.
The young cop looked like he was about to cry.
The rest of Ma Brumsky’s swim-club ladies emerged. All wore towels, and only towels. The elderly gent I’d seen swimming with them exited last, ever a gentleman.
There was no need to wonder further about the police escort. Rejuvenated by whatever hung suspended in the health-center pool, Ma’s happy little group had been busted for ditching their suits in youthful abandon.
Once the last of the swimmers and the cops had disappeared into the police station, I walked around to the driver’s side of the van. Leo had not moved from his perch behind the steering wheel. His normally pale face, now as red as if he’d spent some hours being boiled, was buried in his hands.
I pulled open his door. ‘Surely this isn’t as bad as floating a corpse,’ I whispered before I noticed that his lips were moving. He was murmuring into his phone.
I left him there, slumped forlornly in his brand-new silver Ram van, and headed off to the bank.