He stood in the leaves and looked back at Ashecliffe.
He’d come here for the truth, and didn’t find it. He’d come here for Laeddis, and didn’t find him either. Along the way, he’d lost Chuck.
He’d have time to regret all that back in Boston. Time to feel guilt and shame then. Time to consider his options and consult with Senator Hurly and come up with a plan of attack. He’d come back. Fast. There couldn’t be any question of that. And hopefully he’d be armed with subpoenas and federal search warrants. And they’d have their own goddamned ferry. Then he’d be angry. Then he’d be righteous in his fury.
Now, though, he was just relieved to be alive and on the other side of this wall.
Relieved. And scared.
IT TOOK HIM an hour and a half to get back to the cave, but the woman had left. Her fire had burned down to a few embers, and Teddy sat by it even though the air outside was unseasonably warm and growing clammier by the hour.
Teddy waited for her, hoping she’d just gone out for more wood, but he knew, in his heart, that she wasn’t going to return. Maybe she believed he’d already been caught and was, at this moment, telling the warden and Cawley about her hiding place. Maybe—and this was too much to hope for, but Teddy allowed himself the indulgence—Chuck had found her and they’d gone to a location she believed was safer.
When the fire went out, Teddy took off his suit jacket and draped it over his chest and shoulders and placed his head back against the wall. Just as he had the night before, the last thing he noticed before he passed out were his thumbs.
They’d begun to twitch.
DAY FOUR
The Bad Sailor
20
ALL THE DEAD and maybe-dead were getting their coats.
They were in a kitchen and the coats were on hooks and Teddy’s father took his old pea coat and shrugged his arms into it and then helped Dolores with hers and he said to Teddy, “You know what I’d like for Christmas?”
“No, Dad.”
“Bagpipes.”
And Teddy understood that he meant golf clubs and a golf bag.
“Just like Ike,” he said.
“Exactly,” his father said and handed Chuck his topcoat.
Chuck put it on. It was a nice coat. Prewar cashmere. Chuck’s scar was gone, but he still had those delicate, borrowed hands, and he held them in front of Teddy and wiggled the fingers.
“Did you go with that woman doctor?” Teddy said.
Chuck shook his head. “I’m far too overeducated. I went to the track.”
“Win?”
“Lost big.”
“Sorry.”
Chuck said, “Kiss your wife good-bye. On the cheek.”
Teddy leaned in past his mother and Tootie Vicelli smiling at him with a bloody mouth, and he kissed Dolores’s cheek and he said, “Baby, why you all wet?”
“I’m dry as a bone,” she said to Teddy’s father.
“If I was half my age,” Teddy’s father said, “I’d marry you, girl.”
They were all soaking wet, even his mother, even Chuck. Their coats dripped all over the floor.
Chuck handed him three logs and said, “For the fire.”
“Thanks.” Teddy took the logs and then forgot where he’d put them.
Dolores scratched her stomach and said, “Fucking rabbits. What good are they?”
Laeddis and Rachel Solando walked into the room. They weren’t wearing coats. They weren’t wearing anything at all, and Laeddis passed a bottle of rye over Teddy’s mother’s head and then took Dolores in his arms and Teddy would have been jealous, but Rachel dropped to her knees in front of him and unzipped Teddy’s trousers and took him in her mouth, and Chuck and his father and Tootie Vicelli and his mother all gave him a wave as they took their leave and Laeddis and Dolores stumbled back together into the bedroom and Teddy could hear them in there on the bed, fumbling with their clothes, breathing hoarsely, and it all seemed kind of perfect, kind of wonderful, as he lifted Dolores off her knees and could hear Rachel and Laeddis in there fucking like mad, and he kissed his wife, and placed a hand over the hole in her belly, and she said, “Thank you,” and he slid into her from behind, pushing the logs off the kitchen counter, and the warden and his men helped themselves to the rye Laeddis had brought and the warden winked his approval of Teddy’s fucking technique and raised his glass to him and said to his men:
“That’s one well-hung white nigger. You see him, you shoot first. You hear me? You don’t give it a second thought. This man gets off the island, we are all summarily fucked, gentlemen.”
Teddy threw his coat off his chest and crawled to the edge of the cave.
The warden and his men were up on the ridge above him. The sun was up. Seagulls shrieked.
Teddy looked at his watch: 8 A.M.
“You do not take chances,” the warden said. “This man is combat-trained, combat-tested, and combat-hardened. He has the Purple Heart and the Oak Leaf with Clusters. He killed two men in Sicily with his bare hands.”
That information was in his personnel file, Teddy knew. But how the fuck did they get his personnel file?
“He is adept with the knife and very adept at hand-to-hand combat. Do not get in close with this man. You get the chance, you put him down like a two-legged dog.”
Teddy found himself smiling in spite of his situation. How many other times had the warden’s men been subjected to two-legged-dog comparisons?
Three guards came down the side of the smaller cliff face on ropes and Teddy moved away from the ledge and watched them work their way down to the beach. A few minutes later, they climbed back up and Teddy heard one of them say, “He’s not down there, sir.”
He listened for a while as they searched up near the promontory and the road and then they moved off and Teddy waited a full hour before he left the cave, waiting to hear if anyone was taking up the rear, and giving the search party enough time so that he wouldn’t bump into them.
It was twenty past nine by the time he reached the road and he followed it back toward the west, trying to maintain a fast pace but still listen for men moving either ahead or behind him.
Trey had been right in his weather prediction. It was hot as hell and Teddy removed his jacket and folded it over his arm. He loosened his tie enough to pull it over his head and placed it in his pocket. His mouth was as dry as rock salt, and his eyes itched from the sweat.
He saw Chuck again in his dream, putting on his coat, and the image stabbed him deeper than the one of Laeddis fondling Dolores. Until Rachel and Laeddis had shown up, everyone in that dream was dead. Except for Chuck. But he’d taken his coat from the same set of hooks and followed them out the door. Teddy hated what that symbolized. If they’d gotten to Chuck on the promontory, they’d probably been dragging him away while Teddy climbed his way back out of the field. And whoever had sneaked up on him must have been very good at his job because Chuck hadn’t even gotten off a scream.
How powerful did you have to be to make not one but two U.S. marshals vanish?
Supremely powerful.
And if the plan was for Teddy to be driven insane, then it couldn’t have been the same for Chuck. Nobody would believe two marshals had lost their minds in the same four-day span. So Chuck would have had to meet with an accident. In the hurricane probably. In fact, if they were really smart—and it seemed they were—then maybe Chuck’s death would be represented as the event that had tipped Teddy past the point of no return.
There was an undeniable symmetry to the idea.
But if Teddy didn’t make it off this island, the Field Office would never accept the story, no matter how logical, without sending other marshals out here to see for themselves.
And what would they find?
Teddy looked down at the tremors in his wrists and thumbs. They were getting worse. And his brain felt no fresher for a night’s sleep. He felt foggy, thick-tongued. If by the time the field office got men out here, the drugs had taken over, they’d probab
ly find Teddy drooling into his bathrobe, defecating where he sat. And the Ashecliffe version of the truth would be validated.
He heard the ferry blow its horn and came up on a rise in time to see it finish its turn in the harbor and begin to steam backward toward the dock. He picked up his pace, and ten minutes later he could see the back of Cawley’s Tudor through the woods.
He turned off the road into the woods, and he heard men unloading the ferry, the thump of boxes tossed to the dock, the clang of metal dollies, footfalls on wooden planks. He reached the final stand of trees and saw several orderlies down on the dock, and the two ferry pilots leaning back against the stern, and he saw guards, lots of guards, rifle butts resting on hips, bodies turned toward the woods, eyes scanning the trees and the grounds that led up to Ashecliffe.
When the orderlies had finished unloading the cargo, the pulled their dollies with them back up the dock, but the guards remained, and Teddy knew that their only job this morning was to make damn sure he didn’t reach that boat.
He crept back through the woods and came out by Cawley’s house. He could hear men upstairs in the house, saw one out on the roof where it pitched, his back to Teddy. He found the car in the carport on the western side of the house. A ’47 Buick Roadmaster. Maroon with white leather interior. Waxed and shiny the day after a hurricane. A beloved vehicle.
Teddy opened the driver’s door and he could smell the leather, as if it were a day old. He opened the glove compartment and found several packs of matches, and he took them all.
He pulled his tie from his pocket, found a small stone on the ground, and knotted the narrow end of the tie around it. He lifted the license plate and unscrewed the gas tank cap, and then he threaded the tie and the stone down the pipe and into the tank until all that hung out of the pipe was the fat, floral front of the tie, as if it hung from a man’s neck.
Teddy remembered Dolores giving him this tie, draping it across his eyes, sitting in his lap.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered. “I love it because you gave it to me. But truth is, it is one ugly fucking tie.”
And he smiled up at the sky in apology to her and used one match to light the entire book and then used the book to light the tie.
And then he ran like hell.
He was halfway through the woods when the car exploded. He heard men yell and he looked back, and through the trees he could see the flames vaulting upward in balls, and then there was a set of smaller explosions, like firecrackers, as the windows blew out.
He reached the edge of the woods and he balled up his suit coat and placed it under a few rocks. He saw the guards and the ferrymen running up the path toward Cawley’s house, and he knew if he was going to do this, he had to do it right now, no time to second-guess the idea, and that was good because if he gave any thought at all to what he was about to do, he’d never do it.
He came out of the woods and ran along the shore, and just before he reached the dock and would’ve left himself exposed to anyone running back to the ferry, he cut hard to his left and ran into the water.
Jesus, it was ice. Teddy had hoped the heat of the day might have warmed it up a bit, but the cold tore up through his body like electric current and punched the air out of his chest. But Teddy kept plowing forward, trying not to think about what was in that water with him—eels and jellyfish and crabs and sharks too, maybe. Seemed ridiculous but Teddy knew that sharks attacked humans, on average, in three feet of water, and that’s about where he was now, the water at his waist and getting higher, and Teddy heard shouts coming from up by Cawley’s house, and he ignored the sledgehammer strokes of his heart and dove under the water.
He saw the girl from his dreams, floating just below him, her eyes open and resigned.
He shook his head and she vanished and he could see the keel ahead of him, a thick black stripe that undulated in the green water, and he swam to it and got his hands on it. He moved along it to the front and came around the other side, and forced himself to come up out of the water slowly, just his head. He felt the sun on his face as he exhaled and then sucked in oxygen and tried to ignore a vision of his legs dangling down there in the depths, some creature swimming along and seeing them, wondering what they were, coming close for a sniff…
The ladder was where he remembered it. Right in front of him, and he got a hand on the third rung and hung there. He could hear the men running back to the dock now, hear their heavy footsteps on the planks, and then he heard the warden:
“Search that boat.”
“Sir, we were only gone—”
“You left your post, and now you wish to argue?”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
The ladder dipped in his hand as several men placed their weight on the ferry, and Teddy heard them going through the boat, heard doors opening and furniture shifting.
Something slid between his thighs like a hand, and Teddy gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the ladder and forced his mind to go completely blank because he did not want to imagine what it looked like. Whatever it was kept moving, and Teddy let out a breath.
“My car. He blew up my fucking car.” Cawley, sounding ragged and out of breath.
The warden said, “This has gone far enough, Doctor.”
“We agreed that it’s my decision to make.”
“If this man gets off the island—”
“He’s not going to get off the island.”
“I’m sure you didn’t think he was going to turn your buggy into an inferno, either. We have to break this operation down now and cut our losses.”
“I’ve worked too hard to throw in the towel.”
The warden’s voice rose. “If that man gets off this island, we’ll be destroyed.”
Cawley’s voice rose to match the warden’s. “He’s not going to get off the fucking island!”
Neither spoke for a full minute. Teddy could hear their weight shifting on the dock.
“Fine, Doctor. But that ferry stays. It does not leave this dock until that man is found.”
Teddy hung there, the cold finding his feet and burning them.
Cawley said, “They’ll want answers for that in Boston.”
Teddy closed his mouth before his teeth could chatter.
“Then give them answers. But that ferry stays.”
Something nudged the back of Teddy’s left leg.
“All right, Warden.”
Another nudge against his leg, and Teddy kicked back, heard the splash he made hit the air like a gunshot.
Footsteps on the stern.
“He’s not in there, sir. We checked everywhere.”
“So where did he go?” the warden said. “Anyone?”
“Shit!”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“He’s headed for the lighthouse.”
“That thought did occur to me.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Take some men.”
“I said I’ll handle it. We’ve got men there.”
“Not enough.”
“I’ll handle it, I said.”
Teddy heard Cawley’s shoes bang their way back up the dock and get softer as they hit the sand.
“Lighthouse or no lighthouse,” the warden said to his men, “this boat goes nowhere. Get the engine keys from the pilot and bring them to me.”
HE SWAM MOST of the way there.
Dropped away from the ferry and swam toward shore until he was close enough to the sandy bottom to use it, clawing along until he’d gone far enough to raise his head from the water and risk a glance back. He’d covered a few hundred yards and he could see the guards forming a ring around the dock.
He slipped back under the water and continued clawing, unable to risk the splashing that freestyle or even doggie-paddling would cause, and after a while, he came to the bend in the shoreline and made his way around it and walked up onto the sand and sat in the sun and shook from the cold. He walked as much of the shore as he could before he ran into a set of
outcroppings that pushed him back into the water and he tied his shoes together and hung them around his neck and went for another swim and envisioned his father’s bones somewhere on this same ocean floor and envisioned sharks and their fins and their great snapping tails and barracuda with rows of white teeth and he knew he was getting through this because he had to and the water had numbed him and he had no choice now but to do this and he might have to do it again in a couple of days when the Betsy Ross dropped its booty off the island’s southern tip, and he knew that the only way to conquer fear was to face it, he’d learned that in the war enough, but even so, if he could manage it, he would never, ever, get in the ocean again. He could feel it watching him and touching him. He could feel the age of it, more ancient than gods and prouder of its body count.
He saw the lighthouse at about one o’clock. He couldn’t be sure because his watch was back in his suit jacket, but the sun was in roughly the right place. He came ashore just below the bluff on which it stood and he lay against a rock and took the sun on his body until the shakes stopped and his skin grew less blue.
If Chuck was up there, no matter his condition, Teddy was bringing him out. Dead or alive, he wouldn’t leave him behind.
You’ll die then.
It was Dolores’s voice, and he knew she was right. If he had to wait two days for the arrival of the Betsy Ross, and he had anything but a fully alert, fully functional Chuck with him, they’d never make it. They’d be hunted down…
Teddy smiled.
…like two-legged dogs.
I can’t leave him, he told Dolores. Can’t do it. If I can’t find him, that’s one thing. But he’s my partner.
You only just met him.
Still my partner. If he’s in there, if they’re hurting him, holding him against his will, I have to bring him out.
Even if you die?
Even if I die.
Then I hope he’s not in there.
He came down off the rock and followed a path of sand and shells that curled around the sea grass, and it occurred to him that what Cawley had thought suicidal in him was not quite that. It was more a death wish. For years he couldn’t think of a good reason to live, true. But he also couldn’t think of a good reason to die, either. By his own hand? Even in his most desolate nights, that had seemed such a pathetic option. Embarrassing. Puny.
Shutter Island Page 23
