Undertow

by Warren Adler

  “I can hum it.” Christine hummed a few bars. “To tell the truth, Lou, the real scouts’ honor truth. I don’t care about saving the world, or even helping other people. I don’t relate emotionally to the whole idea of doing things, of getting the country moving in this or that direction.”

  “Does that trouble you?”

  “A little. I’m just here for the ride. I really don’t care where the wagon goes, as long as it goes.”

  “I guess I feel the same way.”

  “No identity crisis?”

  “None.”

  “Think he has?”

  “None at all.”

  “I’d like him to be a great, a loved president.”

  “He probably will be.”

  “Do you love him, Lou?”

  “Yes, I love him, and I know you do. About the only person who never loved him was his father.”

  “How do you know that? I never ever heard him speak of it.”

  “College incident. I met his father only once—a violent man, a carpenter by trade, a drunk by avocation. He showed up drunk one day at school. Had some kind of loud argument with Don. I could hear them through the door of our room. Then the old man walked out, red in the face, unshaven, spittle hanging at the ends of his beard. Don was crying. The old man had punched him pretty good. Last I heard, the old man died soon after. Don didn’t even go to the funeral.”

  “Are you chilly?”

  “Yes.”

  IV

  We started back toward the house. Miraculously, the mist had cleared at last, and while the sun still hung at the end of the earth, we could see the clear beginnings of the moon.

  As we got closer to the house, we could make out two figures running towards us along the water’s edge. It was Don and Marlena. From where we stood, with the rays of the diminishing sun slanting over the water, they looked like the pas de deux of a ballet. They were playing some kind of tag, splashing along the water’s edge, apparently ignoring the iciness of the water. Don was in light blue jockey shorts and sweatshirt, while Marlena wore a glistening white bikini bottom and black sweater. They splashed along the edge of the angry foam. Occasionally, Marlena was caught and pulled toward the dry sand where she was firmly held, and then she escaped again to the water’s edge.

  “There he goes again—Mr. Energy,” Christine said.

  Now it was Don who was being chased. He ran toward the ocean, slowed up as the water reached his knees, and then, like a broken field running halfback, headed straight for the charging Marlena, sidestepped when he reached her, slapped her hard on the butt, and ran off again. We could hear their laughter as we got closer.

  “I’ll be damned if he’s going to get me going on that one,” Christine said, slowing down. “I would put nothing past him when he gets overenergized. He’ll think nothing of throwing us both into the water.”

  “Not this boy. Maybe they’ll get tired if we walk slowly.”

  We were still about an eighth of a mile from where they cavorted; and as we approached slowly we could see her lunge for him and miss, fall, then rise again like a track runner to the count of go, and run off after him in a relentless ritual. When she seemed to falter, he would stop, head for her again, stand within her reach as she waited, knees together, catlike, coiling to pounce. Then, energy gathered, she sprang forward, reached out and missed, then ran after him gathering speed with her long graceful strides, slower than his, but covering distance always a short way from him. He led her again straight into the sea, further than before, up to his thighs. She followed, kicking outward and sideways for balance. Then she was nearly upon him, lunging to catch him around the neck, but he ducked, shifted stride, and headed back toward the beach again.

  Her lunge had harvested only pure air, and she fell, slipping like a brown stick into the churning surf. He turned when he reached the white part of the beach, pointed, laughed, and sat down. She got up, fell, got up, and fell again. Then she began to drift outward on the tide, caught in a cross fire of breakers. It was too close to shore to generate panic, until one realized that there was an enormous hump in the near-shore carved by the pounding. But the realization was inescapable. Marlena was in trouble. Don seemed rooted to the ground; then suddenly he was jumping into the surf, diving in headforward, and in a burst of adrenalin-charged energy, I was running, then following him blindly into the surf. He was by far the better swimmer. He would jump, come up angled like a porpoise, look about him to that spot where he had last seen Marlena’s head, then jump again. I followed his movements, trying to stay afloat and close enough, peering into the thumping sea for some signs of Marlena, listening for a sound. We were well over our heads, although close enough to see Christine, petrified with fear, standing on her toes along the water’s edge, holding her body from jumping in behind us.

  The sun had disappeared, it seemed, almost instantly, and the darkness came swifter than it had ever come before, as a kind of retribution, as if lights were going out in a blackout all over the shore. Then I couldn’t see Don anymore. I thrashed about, desperately trying to keep my body buoyant, hitting each wave and crosscurrent as if my fist would have the strength to stop its onslaught. I dived, saw nothing but the dark sea, surfaced, dived again. My lungs felt as if they were bursting. It must have been panic or pure instinctive self-preservation, but suddenly I felt myself fighting to reach the shore. My mind was only on my own survival. Then, as I struggled flaying the mad waters with my arms, something struck my thigh. I put my hands down and felt human hair. I grabbed it, lifted the head and looked into Don’s tortured face, the eyes open, the lips distorted. I held on and struggled toward Christine, who had waded in up to her thighs, following our life and death struggle as the waters carried us sideways with the tide.

  She was crying something unintelligible. I tried to hear. I was beyond my strength, lost in a nightmare of salt and foam and enveloping darkness. I told myself to be calm. I told myself to live. The waters swirled around me. I swallowed mouthfuls, choked, vomited, but held on to Don. The scalp must be a tough part of the human anatomy. I wrapped my fingers round his hair and pulled inward as I fought to reach firm ground. Suddenly, I found a rhythm to my movements, a kind of step in time with the tide, and I was moving inward, finding the push of the tide. Then, not knowing how long the struggle continued, conscious only of the night and Christine’s outstretched arm, we reached the hump of the water’s edge and fought our way to the top. At that point, there must have been a loss of consciousness. There was no telling how long it lasted, but when my lungs functioned again, I was under a blanket, still clutching Don’s body, my chest freezing against the wet beach, and Christine’s body astride us both, giving us whatever warmth was available. I felt her breath on my neck. I turned around.

  “Marlena?”

  I saw Christine’s eyes. She could not speak. Then I was crawling up toward the beach house. I made the front porch and pulled myself up by the doorposts. My knees sank. I tried again. Without quite making it, I stumbled toward the whiskey table and found a bottle of Jack Daniels. Opening the top, I sucked out a swallow, then vomited it up, did it again, held it, felt the warmth hit my stomach, recoiled, swallowed again, and then, somehow, made it back to where Don lay. He was faintly conscious, and Christine was applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with almost instinctive efficiency. Don coughed. She released his mouth and massaged his body with her hands. We didn’t say a word to him as I joined her in the massage, then dragged his body along the sand to the drier beach. She brought out more blankets. I buried him in them as we rubbed him.

  He was chilled, but conscious now. I put the nozzle of the Jack Daniels in his mouth and he gulped, coughed, held it down, and sat up. He put his head between his knees and held it there, reaching for the bottle again, drinking and coughing, but regaining his strength.

  “Marlena?”

  I stood up and started back to the nightmare of the sea, perhaps angrier at us now that we had partially defeated her. Conscious of my nu
dity, my clothes apparently ripped off by the ocean’s wrath, I stood at the water’s edge and looked up and down the ends of the beach, now becoming moonlit.

  “Marlena,” I shouted, summoning every bit of my strength for that one shout. I walked first one way down the beach then the other.

  “Marlena,” I shouted again, but even the sound of my voice could not be heard over the ocean.

  Soon Don was beside me; we pulled Christine’s blankets around our bodies.

  “Maybe she was carried sideways and is washed up not far from here.” We clung to the hope. I ran down one end of the beach; he tried the other. We all shouted Marlena’s name, like some weird chorus counterpointing the ocean’s mad melody.

  There was no sense of time. Only the physical act of searching and the panic of what was swiftly emerging as reality. Soon we fell exhausted on the beach again. Don was crying and pounding his fist into the soft surface. He was screaming and flaying the sand until it appeared that he would soon start swallowing it. Christine and I, still not speaking, reached him and held him down. Soon he was quiet but still on the edge of hysteria.

  “This is a dream and soon we’re all going to wake up from it. Isn’t that right, Lou? Christine? This is a dream. We’re having a bad dream, a nightmare, and Marlena is in the house.”

  “Sure, Don. That’s what it is,” Christine said. Her face had gone chalky white and her hair lay matted and sand-soaked on her head. She appeared to find some solace in looking at her fingers.

  In our whole lives, I don’t think any of us had ever experienced such terror. We were worldly, wise, sophisticated. Now we were benumbed, actionless, wishing that it were us beneath the sea. The confrontation of the present reality was unbearable.

  “Now what?” Don said suddenly, and we knew his mind had begun to function again.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Let’s just sit here and wait,” Christine said.

  “Wait for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe that’s a good idea,” Don said. “I don’t know what to do. I can’t believe that any of this has happened.”

  I shivered. “We’ll freeze out here.”

  We huddled together, our arms around each other for warmth and—perhaps, more so—for security.

  “We should do something,” Don said.

  “What?”

  “Call for help?”

  “Help?” Don shrugged. “Who can help?”

  V

  We sat silently for a long time, without the sense of time-passage, frozen into inactivity, peering into the sea. For Don, there was more than the shock of death. There had passed between him and the dead girl something beyond what we could experience. There was a sense of loss.

  For us, there was only the sense of tragedy, certainly less of a feeling of loss—pity, rather. Here was a beautiful, pulsating woman, full of vigor, one moment alive, then gone to some horrible Valkyrie, punished for some nameless sins.

  By degrees, the event, the death, the near drowning, became a secondary consideration.

  “What happens now?” Don had said it, certainly out of his own concern for what had always been the look ahead. Don was not one for nostalgia. What was past was past. He had always looked ahead, relentlessly. I had the feeling that if our positions were reversed, he would have known how to advise me.

  “That person,” Don said suddenly. “I keep thinking of that lovely person. The thing is simply too big for me to understand.”

  He put his head in his hands and sobbed. I had only seen him cry once in the twenty-five years of our friendship, that time after the visit from his father. But then, looking back, his life had been touched with a minimum of tragedy. All the people he had ever cared about were still alive. His mother. Friends. Children. Even old loves. He had never been in combat. He had rarely confronted death. He had never even attended his father’s funeral. Death was a foreign visitor.

  Soon we found the strength to move and made our way back to the house. The night was clear and cold, even for late spring. The sky was a canopy of stars, and the moon gave off enough light for us to pick our way back to the house. Christine put a kettle of water on the range and brought out a change for Don, who toweled himself listlessly and dressed in the living room. His hands were shaking and it was impossible for him to button his shirt, which he left opened and tucked in.

  I poured out two heavy tumblers of Jack Daniels and we drank it down like water. It burned deeply. Christine showered and emerged shortly, wearing slacks and a sweater.

  “Well, what happens next?” Don said. It was the third time he had asked the question.

  “Well,” I said, “I think maybe we should discuss the options.”

  “Options?”

  “There are options, you know, Don.”

  “In the face of this horror, there are no options.”

  “Life goes on,” Christine said, voicing the eternal platitude.

  “Not for Marlena.”

  “But for you.”

  “You know something? I don’t give a shit. I don’t give one shit.”

  “Well, there are lots who do.”

  “We should have called for help. Why didn’t we call for help?” Don stood up and paced the narrow room. “Why didn’t we call for help?”

  “Don’t throw that monkey on my back,” I raised my voice. “You had that option, too.”

  Don softened.

  “I’m sorry, Lou, I really am sorry.”

  I knew, though, that for the rest of his life, the idea would bother him. Facing reality, I would say that Marlena was beyond help, lost in the deep somewhere. I looked at the little cuckoo clock in the corner. It was ten o’clock. It took only a few minutes for a person to drown. What good would help have done? Forever, now, we must assume that help could not have taken back Marlena from the sea. You might say, surely there was some chance. No. There was no chance. This fact is incontrovertible.

  “I still ask,” Don said. “What happens now?”

  “We go over the options.”

  “Options, again.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s not go over any options. Pick up the damn phone and call the police. You tell the police that you, Senator Donald James, were up here for the weekend, shacking up with this black chick, and while high on pot you ran into the water. The temperature of the water was about forty degrees. She tripped and fell and drowned. There’s the telephone. That’s the simplest way. Go on and do it.”

  “Leave him alone, will you, Lou?” Christine said.

  “How can I leave him alone? We’ve got to come up with an idea, and he’s got to be a part of it.”

  “Lou, can’t you see he’s in no fit condition to make any sensible decisions?” Christine was right about that. Don was shaking uncontrollably. I poured him another tumbler of bourbon. His hand could barely retain the glass. I wasn’t too steady myself. But of one thing I was certain—Don needed me now. He needed his old buddy badly.

  “Okay, I won’t go over options, just possibilities,” I said, “Don, please listen.” His eyes were filled with tears, his shoulders shaking with sobs.

  My mind was functioning now. It was a strange kind of lucidity. “Christine, we must make him understand.”

  Christine went to him and put her arms around him gently, as a mother might confort a troubled son. He let her caress his damp hair.

  “You’ve got to listen, Don,” she said.

  “I know this must sound like it’s reverberating in your head from a great distance, Don, but there are other considerations—political considerations.” At last, I had spit it out. It was the unspoken, the all-pervasive, the reason for everything. “Unless you’re ready to quit,” I said.

  “I’m finished, Lou,” Don said, pushing Christine aside, his voice returning to its strength, the reality of his position at last infiltrating his consciousness. “Maybe I deserve to be finished.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “and if you accept that, the
n I would advise picking up the phone and calling the police.”

  He seemed quieter now. He got up and moved toward the screened porch. I followed him. He walked out onto the beach and looked toward the ocean. The moon in its three-quarters phase gave enough light to pick up the swirls of the sea.

  “Do you suppose—” he said, turning an anguished face toward me.

  “Not a chance,” I answered. “How could there be?”

  “Was it my fault, Lou?” he said.

  “No.”

  “She had a right to life. She would have been alive if I hadn’t brought her out here.”

  I did not answer him. He was working things out for himself. He had to.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “A freak! A one-in-a-million accident.”

  “Did we do all we could to save her?”

  “All we could? We nearly died in the process.”

  “Did we nearly die?”

  “Yes, Don.”

  “Why do you suppose we were saved?”

  “Pure chance,” I said.

  “Lou—” He turned to me. His face was black. The light of the moon did not reveal his features. “How can I face anybody? How can I face Karen, the kids, the public? I just don’t think I can face anybody. On top of it all, through all this misery and grief, I’m ashamed.” An involuntary sob escaped from somewhere deep down in his being.

  “Now I want you to listen to me, Don,” I said. “I’m going to try to be pragmatic. Do you understand what I mean? I’m going to try to face the facts of this situation. Will you listen to me? Can you listen?”

  He shrugged his shoulders indifferently. The shock had obviously taken its toll. He seemed barely able to comprehend. He seemed beyond the ability to understand.

  VI

  “Come on into the house,” I said, leading him back to the living room of the beach house.

  “I called the Rehoboth Hospital,” Christine whispered, “on the off chance that someone had discovered her, washed up along the beach. I was anonymous and discreet—told them I was looking for my sister—nothing.”