by Hadley Hury
“Sounds like one of Bin Laden’s boys,” said Chaz.
Sydney and Terry both spoke at once: “Same thing.”
***
By five o’clock, Terry’s voice was wearing down, Chaz’s questions had become less plaintive and more probing, and Sydney’s spirits were on a slow but sure rise. Their role would put them closer to the actual event, but there seemed no other way. And she was as certain of Terry’s determination as she was of the set of checks-and-balances that would keep him in line and keep her and Chaz clear of implication. The fact that what Terry had actually begun to do was to create the outline of a play, a script for them, not only impressed but exhilarated her. There was a fine symmetry to the fact that they would all be actors. It would be the ultimate proof that what she had come to believe a few years back was true: the only interesting, and valuable, theatrical art takes place in the conduct of real life.
They spent their last hour before heading back to the coast fleshing out the roles, the timing, the nuances.
Terry had left it with Michael that he would be back in touch immediately. That he should pray about what a great gift God was presenting him. And that he shouldn’t even think about getting away not only because God would punish him but because it was impossible. (Terry’s “superiors in the cause” had authorized him to put a team of private investigators on twenty-four-hour surveillance until the mission was accomplished. “It’s for your own good, son. They don’t want you to blow your chance to get this right, to serve God in such a vital, once-in-a-lifetime way.”)
“I also built up his feeling that he was a member of a team, a chosen MVP, by swearing him to secrecy. He’s really locked into that Pensacola Revival thing. It’s been his big spiritual teat, I think, since he hightailed it out of the Appalachian woods where he apparently hid out for several weeks last summer. Going to that tent with a few thousand other lost souls five or six nights a week has been an integrating focus. That’s why I alluded vaguely to one or two of ‘the superiors’ he would meet when we got together again—and that they had close connections to the Revival.”
Sydney mused, “He needs to have no doubt that he is needed, that he belongs.”
“Exactly. It’s the critical variable. The idea about the private eyes put the fear of God in him.”
“But now we need to put a loving face on the mission. Ensure his motivation. To welcome him and lift him up in the loving arms of fellow-believers.” Sydney knew the territory. “That’s easy. We can do that.”
“I thought you could. Some sort of special emissary from the upper echelons of the movement.”
The first come-to-Jesus summit would be at some out-of-the-way location further east, to be followed by a last-minute hand-holding if necessary.
***
Before going their separate ways, they reviewed each element of the strategy. They assessed the risks, over and over, reassuring themselves, individually and as a unit, with the various self-protections that could be reliably built in. With the various fallback options at every stage right up to the very moment of the event.
There was a provision for every possible development. If Charlie broke form and unexpectedly talked with anyone about the land, or somehow moved faster with his attorney and the will change, they would cancel. If the final seduction of Michael for whatever reason didn’t work and he somehow got away (perhaps even, they had had to consider, by suicide), they would cancel. If he talked to anyone, it would be their very credible amazement against the outrageous babblings of a deranged criminal fanatic. Nothing would be lost. Terry could console himself with a little upfront money and Chaz and Sydney would have a terrific beach house for their sunset years.
They also reviewed every element of their business plan. Their talk was extremely candid, everyone knowing that they had already journeyed light-years and there was no time to waste. Instead of resenting it, Sydney found herself quite reassured by Terry’s elaborately detailed selfishness and the unblinking eye with which he watched his back. She trusted his hungriness and his utter inability to trust.
For engaging in a more active role in the actual event, Terry was to receive fifty thousand dollars. Ten now, twenty if they decided on the final “go,” and twenty immediately after. And the involvement of Chaz and Sydney, if indeed at a certain remove, was nonetheless his added insurance of their all staying on the same page. Should they renege on his cut after the disposition of the will and the sale of the property, he would talk. Even with no hard evidence like video or sound, he could give the authorities too good a story to ignore. Getting them to believe it might be a challenge, since in the current will Chaz was heir, no one knew that was about to change, and therefore he’d have no apparent motive. But Terry reminded them of their own threats about the media. This would be exactly the sort of juicy soap opera investigative journalists thrived on, with the two of them as the stars, day in and day out until they cracked.
As for their part, Sydney and Chaz knew that Terry wasn’t about to risk prison by coming back to them for more.
Discretion was the very best part of valor for everyone concerned.
As Sydney put it, just before they dispersed, “The prospect of mutual poverty can do much to keep everyone honest. None of us gets a thing if this doesn’t work, and if anyone turns on the other after we succeed, we lose everything. All we have to do is concentrate on making it work. We can all have everything we want.”
Charlie, a nice enough man who had fatally presumed on other people’s capacities and dreams, would simply make his exit a few years before expected, dispatched by a madman. And the madman, in turn, would, happily, no doubt, be dispatched by Terry from this corrupted mortal wasteland for an early meeting with his Maker.
Terry mentioned that he would probably sell the Blue Bar. Getting, Sydney and Chaz reckoned, at least a couple more million. That, plus the five, would make for a promising new start. He’d always wondered, he said, about Santa Fe. Perhaps, Antigua. Or even farther afield—Geneva or Florence, maybe Marbella.
Buyers would be lining up for that land. It could all be over and done with by winter, spring at the latest.
It seemed a bit of a pity to Sydney that there was little to no likelihood they’d ever spend much time in Laurel. From what she’d seen of it, it seemed, after all, in a ramshackle sort of way, a pretty enough little place.
Chapter 27
Hudson and Susie had biked the trail from Laurel to Seaside, stopping for a paperback Susie had ordered at the bookshop and to refill their water bottles, before heading east along 26-A through Seagrove. After the houses and beach traffic thinned out and the road veered away from the sea into the bridge at the inland neck of Eastern Lake, Hudson called out to pull over into the shade of some pines.
Susie creaked to a halt beside him on the old clunker she had liberated from use as a hose rack in the Sandifords’ tool shed. “I can feel the pounds evaporating into the torrid ozone.” Susie drew her arm across her brow and readjusted her cap and sunglasses.
Hudson momentarily considered her willowy twenty-four-year-old frame. “A real problem, I’m sure.”
“I’m reading Edith Wharton and, you know, all that Gilded Age stuff—it just makes me feel fat.”
Hudson laughed. “Ozone? That’s where things evaporate?”
“Oh, what do I know? I’m an English major. It just sounded appropriate. Are we nearly there?”
“I think so.” Hudson scrutinized the hand-drawn map Charlie had roughed out for them. It wasn’t terribly detailed but Hudson remembered enough to think that the area lay not very far ahead.
***
Charlie’s commentary hadn’t been terribly detailed either, though he had volunteered the destination eagerly enough when earlier in the week Hudson had mentioned wanting to break in his new bike. “Some of the trails are just footpaths, though. You’ve been over that way once. I sent you and Kate on a picnic. I own some land over there,” he had added dismissively. “That whole stretch of beach
and wilderness is really something, the highest dunes on the coast. You told me you saw herons on the back lagoon.”
Of course Hudson had remembered.
Kate, standing like a statue in the violet and green twilight, a full golden moon staring at her through the oaks and cypress and he staring at them both; the herons, some seventy-five yards away, seeming at once the masters of the scene and gorgeously, almost unbearably vulnerable, like an etching from memory of some dream of perfection.
He remembered, too, that a day or two later when Libby and Brad had had them over for dinner they had smiled at one another over Charlie’s modest characterization of his property. “‘Owns some property’ is right,” said Libby. “There’ve always been rumors about the exact acreage and value but we try to protect his privacy and not add to the speculation.”
Brad had added, “Real estate has been the most popular topic of conversation in these parts for over fifty years. But that’s just not Charlie, and that’s one of the things we’ve always respected about him. He’s said, and of course he’s absolutely right, that it could become the only conversation of his life and that more agents and developers than already do would be bothering him constantly. I mean, I suppose it’s a matter of public record if someone wanted to go down and look through the county assessor’s office.”
“In a way,” said Libby, “that huge St. Joe Corporation resort development site has gotten him off the hook somewhat. For the last six or eight years that’s been the big question mark.”
“He’s told us that every once in awhile somebody in the media will approach him but he’s always declined to be interviewed.”
Libby had smiled. “And isn’t that refreshing?’
And that had been all there was to that.
***
It was after seven when Hudson wheeled his bike into the large storage closet at the back of the cottage. He had been drenched, dried, and re-drenched in sweat so many times that his shorts, tee shirt, socks, and especially his skin felt as if they had been varnished. He changed into his trunks and headed for the beach with Moon.
This time of day, anywhere, was Hudson’s favorite but nowhere, he suddenly knew, more than here. It was still warm, but the grinding white heat of the day had ebbed away with the tide and a breeze from the northwest brought the slash pines and tall oaks along Pendennis Street to life. The sun would be just on the horizon, but an hour before it had nestled into a mass of towering cumulus clouds which, except for their fiery coronas, were darkening by the minute into grays and indigo. Overhead, small land birds and terns cruised the opalescent sky and along the shore gulls awakened from one-legged slumber and began to bathe and strut.
A man watering his small patch of lawn and a row of hibiscus waved and said hello to Hudson. A band of kids loaded down with every imaginable sort of paraphernalia staggered past on their way from the beach, and Hudson suddenly saw himself at that age, never happier than dead-tired after a day in the sand with his head already filled with plans for the next. But, now, he was just another invisible adult to them. They said hello only to Moon.
Occasionally they passed through a riff of music drifting out from a screened porch or the low chime of ice in glasses. From the end of the road, where it elbowed east and became the main drag, he could see several vehicles lounging around the Blue Bar, people coming and going.
***
The Gulf was as calm as a lake. He swam some laps until he realized that he had had more than enough exercise for one day. Then he contented himself with bobbing in the shallows while Moon pranced in and out of the low surf and for awhile they played fetch with a piece of driftwood. The walkers and joggers were thinning out and the last of the die-hard children were being corralled by parents who were long past their feet-up-with-a-drink time.
After an hour or so Hudson dried off, Moon shook with brisk efficiency, and they began trudging across the wide beach.
Suddenly, for several minutes, he lost his connection to the glorious twilight and fell into a cavernous maw of grief and rage.
The dog looked up several times and finally sounded a wistful moan. Hudson, finding that they were halfway up Pendennis, reached down and ruffled his neck.
“Thought you’d lost me again, huh? It’s okay, boy. I’m here.”
***
That evening he knocked off a healthy chunk of reading for school, and even wallowed for an hour in the tawdry suspense novel that he had begun purely for pleasure. Then he checked another review.
The only difficulty with some of the reviews, of course, was that in selecting and editing them, he inevitably relived the particular afternoon or evening he and Kate had seen the film. Her reaction. To the film or to his review, or both. She always either read them or had him read them aloud to her. He remembered their discussions, how certain lines that had passed into their lore repeated themselves over and over again at opportune moments. Her face, now pensive, now smiling, as they talked. He had never in his life seen a woman whose intelligence was so ineffably related to her sensual appeal. He had once told her, “You are never more beautiful than when we’re discussing ideas. I feel as though we’re making love. And when we do make love I often feel as though we’re talking.” That had evoked one of her great murmuring laughs. But she knew what he meant and seemed pleased.
He had decided to arrange the book by emphasis sections. Directors, writers, performances, best overall, and, for laughs, a few representatives of the bottom of the cinematic barrel. But, for now, what he most needed to do was to e-mail Alex, something he’d been intending for the last few days to do.
Dear Alex,
First of all, I want to thank you for helping me.
Of course, I’ve been aware that I don’t know what I would’ve done without you from time to time, but it seems that being here these past two weeks has enabled me to realize the full scope of your effort. Trying to determine whether its source is in your being a priest or in your role as a counseling psychologist seems a futile exercise. I simply know that you have a rare capacity for seeing into a person’s heart and mind, for understanding, for communicating the difficult and the complex, and for knowing just how to inspire someone to help himself even when he can find very little, if any, reason for doing so.
You asked me for a progress report.
You were, as you seem to have an eerie way of always being, right about what coming back to this place I love could do for me. I’m seeing old friends and, I think, making a couple of new ones. I run on the beach every morning and pass the day working with pleasure. I had lost sight of how extraordinary this place has always been for me. It’s that place in the world—I hope everybody has one—where time means everything and nothing, where the past, present, and future are capable of converging with less painful consequences than I had begun to believe was possible.
Coming through the door of this cottage was, as we’d imagined, the hardest thing I’ve done since I walked back into the house in Memphis that first time…
Alex, I have just come back to this letter, after being on the porch, sitting and staring into the night and having two glasses of wine. Now I’ll say what brought me to a crashing halt an hour ago.
I sense that you will be expecting this. From a couple of our more recent conversations, I would guess that it is a progression which you probably have anticipated, or hoped for for me, but which, of course, in your astute kindness, you have waited for me to discover. To say.
Kate is becoming more like a memory.
If I live another fifty years, and no matter how life may become new for me or I for it, I will in all probability forget nothing of our life together. It was life as fully as I’ve ever known it.
But I have, as I believe you’ve foreseen, ceased to struggle and I don’t mean by that that I’ve given up. You always said that giving up would never prove an option for me. “You’re just a little too driven, I think, for that. No, you’ll either go on, or go really crazy.” Your inimitable bedside manner at its
best, eh, Alex?
I’m going on. Where? I have no idea. How? Even less. Why? I’m not sure. Except that it has to do with God, and the relentless sorrows and joys of being human. And Kate. And good friends and teaching and writing. And people like you. And trees, and the air at dawn, and the light of the world in the evening.
Hud
P.S.…and Moon, who sends his warmest regards, and Olive, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
It was nearly one when he padded down the hall to the bedroom. He looked as he almost always did at the framed photograph on the old teak dresser. It had been taken at their engagement party and like most great true portraits, it had been spontaneous. They were holding hands and had just turned in toward one another and back at the friend who’d said their names. They were framed in a pale wash of late-afternoon radiance from the French doors just beyond them. They looked so indescribably happy that it seemed they might just have, together, only moments before, been born.
Hudson picked up the picture and carried it to the other bedroom, where he left it on a small table. Then he came back into his bedroom, went into the closet and found, in a box padded with socks, another framed photo which he placed on the dresser. It was of Kate alone, standing in the middle distance. They had been hiking in Colorado and she had gone ahead on the trail while he fiddled with the camera. Just as he was getting her in focus she stopped at a point where the trail jagged around an outcropping of rock. She had raised her hand to beckon him on.
