The Empty Copper Sea

by John D. MacDonald

  “And take her a ton of food. Ah, me. Ah, so. And so it goes. Let’s order before I faint from hunger. You are a child of your times, McGee. And so am I. Call her what you will, but call me a waiter.”

  Fourteen

  There are days you can’t ever forget. It doesn’t mean that anything really startling has to happen. It was a great glowing golden day in May. A Sunday numbered twenty-two. There you are in the midst of life, and one of those days comes rolling at you, and it is just like one of the magical days of childhood, like the first Monday after school is out.

  We couldn’t warn John Tuckerman and Gretel Howard we were coming. We had to hope they’d be glad to see us when we showed up an hour before noon. And they were. Demonstrably glad. She knew how to accept gifts. None of this “Aw, you shouldn’t have.” She went through the hamper and the cooler, giving little yelps of delight. “Hey! How about this? Wow! Look here, Johnny! Hey, you crazy guys. A jar of red caviar! Have you gone nuts, bonkers, utterly strange?”

  I was glad that Meyer had realized it would be best not to bring any booze, or any beer. Tuckerman seemed slightly dazed. He wore a gentle smile. He rocked back and forth, heel to toe. You had to speak to him twice to get an answer.

  “I said is the fishing any good?”

  “Oh. Sure. I mean, I guess so. Haven’t done much good. But they’re out there, all right. They’re out there.”

  He looked much better. It took me a few moments to realize that not only had he shaved; his mustache and hair had been trimmed back a little. He seemed to want to be part of the festivities, but he could not quite keep track of the chatter. We were not trying to dazzle him with repartee or profundities. It was just your normal picnic conversation, but it was as if he were a foreigner among us, looking back and forth with a slightly baffled expression, able to speak the language, only not all that well.

  One odd little incident happened. Gretel stopped in the middle of a sentence and stared at John. He sat with his eyes squeezed shut and his jaw knotted. She put her hand on his rigid arm.

  “Are you going to be all right?” she asked.

  He nodded. And in a little while the tensions went out of him. I asked her about that later, after we had swum down the beach and were walking back, and she said that it was hallucinations. They happened now and again. Some sort of a cousin of delirium tremens, the result of the booze with which he had almost killed himself. She told me that was the reason she did not want to leave him alone. She didn’t want to take him into town yet, or go in without him. Hence her magic washing machine. She thought that I had guessed the problem, and that was why I had brought enough food for fifteen people. By great exercise of character I made myself admit I hadn’t guessed it.

  We sat on the side of a dune. We could have been the only two people in the world. I wanted to kiss her. My heart was in my throat. I felt fifteen again. I looked into her eyes and saw her amused acceptance of us, and knew I could. It was immediately intense, astonishing both of us, as was admitted later. We lay back against the slope of the dune, as closely enclasped as we could get, and it was all very delicious for a long time, and then it began to get a little bit too yeasty for the time and place. “Hey!” she said in a muffled voice. “Hey you! McGee!” And then, with a muscular squirm, she kicked us over far enough so that we began rolling, and we rolled over and over down to the bottom of the dune and had to go into the Gulf again to rinse off the sand that had caked on our sweaty bodies.

  It was a great day. Eating and swimming and napping, walking and talking. A simple day. I can remember the precise pattern of the white grains of sand on the round tan meat of her shoulder, and the patterns of the droplets of seawater on her long thigh. Gretel filled my eyes. I learned her by heart, wrists and ankles, mouth corners and hairline, the high arches and slender feet, downy hollow of her back, tidy ears, flat to the good skull.

  There would never be enough time in all the world for us to say to each other all the things that needed saying, time to tell all that had happened to each of us before the other had appeared—a sudden shining in the midst of life. In so many ways she was like a lady lost long ago, so astonishingly like her—not in appearance as much as in the climate of the heart—that it was like being given another chance after the gaming table had already been closed for good. She had a great laugh. It was a husky, full-throated bray, an explosion of laughter, uncontrolled. And she laughed at the right places.

  The second strange incident happened in late afternoon when the four of us were up on the roofed deck of the cottage, sitting in the ragged old deck chairs and the unraveling wicker ones, squinting into the sun glare off the broad Gulf.

  Meyer had talked a little bit about the odds and ends we had unearthed, Mr. Wedley recovering his red Mazda, the items Kristin had left behind, DeeGee Walloway’s guess as to what had happened. Things like that. I realized that Meyer was sidestepping the big dramatic incident. When he ran down I said, “Leaving it to me?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Leaving what?” Gretel asked.

  “Nothing at all. Really.” I became Lawrence of Arabia. “Chap tried to blow some large ugly shotgun holes in us last night. Number twelve. Range of fifteen feet. Missed. Wounded our vehicle.”

  “He missed,” Meyer said, “because that slothful-looking beach bum sitting there with the rotten imitation accent has one of the most fantastic reaction times you would ever care to see. I heard a strange little clicking behind us and suddenly McGee slammed into me, and as I was tumbling along the asphalt I heard a deafening pair of explosions.”

  She had worn a half smile, anticipating some sort of joke. But when she realized Meyer was quite serious, her jaw dropped and her eyes went wide in consternation. “How terrible!” she said.

  “He jumped up and ran over to the fellow and yanked the gun away from him before he could reload and aim again, and the fellow ran right out into the Bay Street traffic and got hit by a car. We saw him get hit. We knew no one could survive that kind of impact, especially a man that heavy. He died on the operating table.”

  “Who was it?” Tuckerman asked.

  “Nick Noyes.”

  Tuckerman boggled at me. “Nick,” he said. “Nick. Nick.” It was not a sound of anguish or dismay. It was a puzzled expression he wore, as if he were trying to remember something about Noyes.

  “He worked for Hub too, didn’t he?” Gretel said. “In construction or something? Johnny, didn’t the two of you hang around together after Hub left? Isn’t that what you told me?”

  I sat between Tuckerman and his sister. Tuckerman reached over and put his right hand on my forearm and clamped down. I would not have believed him that powerful. “Nicky is dead? Really?”

  “Very dead, John.”

  The grip slowly softened and he took his hand away. His smile came slowly, and grew and grew. It was one of the contagious smiles of childhood, a big candy-apple, cotton-candy, roller-coaster smile.

  “I won’t have to kill him!” John Tuckerman said joyously.

  Gretel inhaled sharply. “Johnny!”

  “Well, I won’t. You heard him, Gretel. Nicky is dead, and I won’t have to even think about killing him any more. That’s the best thing I’ve heard in a long time.”

  “Why would you think you had to kill him?”

  “Oh, I’ve known I’d have to.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he was after me.”

  “After you? How?”

  “Just after me, dammit.”

  “But if he was after you, dear, wouldn’t he have come out here?”

  “Oh, he’s been here. A lot. Sneaking around. You wouldn’t know about it. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t want to worry you, that’s all. Now he won’t be around here any more. Unless …” He stopped and stared at me and began to glower.

  “What’s the matter, John?”

  “You two could be helping him. You could be lying, to make it all easier for him.”

  We couldn’t
ease his suspicions until Meyer remembered he had the Sunday edition of the Bay Journal down in the car. He got it, and Tuckerman was at last willing to admit Noyes was dead. He went down to ground level and climbed the dune and sat just over the crest of it with his back to us, silhouetted against the sea glare.

  “Let me apologize,” Gretel said. “We’ve been through this before. I thought he was over it. So I asked about Nick Noyes, trying to lead John into it in … a less squirrelly fashion. From what I gather, Nick looked John up to commiserate with him, to get drunk together and cuss Hub Lawless and talk about their bad luck. That was while John was still living at the Vista, and before he had smashed up his car. I think Nick suspected that Hub’s disappearance was planned and that my brother was in on it somehow. I think he was trying to pry information out of John. John is quite sure he did not reveal anything. He’s not really sure, of course, but he thinks Nick Noyes was so angry at the whole thing, and so sure Hub had left with Miss Petersen, that if he thought John had any part in it, he would have blown the whistle. It would be actionable, wouldn’t it?”

  “Accessory to fraud, or conspiracy to defraud,” Meyer said. “Something ominous at any rate.”

  “Also, that Wright Fletcher, the Sheriff’s deputy, was out here prodding away at Johnny. He came several times after I was here, and I finally told him to make an arrest or stay away. He didn’t seem to have anything to go on except the idea that, inasmuch as John was Hub’s best friend, John had to know about anything Hub planned and did.”

  “He believes Noyes was out here prowling around?”

  “Practically every night. He was very very sure one night. He said he could hear him. We’d had a hard rain earlier in the evening. It dappled the sand and took out footprints and tire tracks. There was just that one hard rain. The next morning I made him walk the perimeter with me. There wasn’t a footprint or a tire track for a hundred yards in any direction. I almost convinced him Nick hadn’t been here. At noontime he told me that it was pretty obvious Nick had a special pair of shoes with soles which imitated the marks rain makes. He was serious. It breaks my heart. He was always so damned sane and practical and fun. At times—I don’t know—I get the feeling he’s putting me on, that it is all some kind of a weird game, and then I will realize he means it, he really means it all.”

  “Any idea why he thinks Noyes was after him?”

  “No. None. It’s an obsession. Nick was after him, just after him. No reason. Look at him out there! God only knows what sick thoughts are crawling through his head. He’s better than he was. He let me trim his hair. You noticed? He finally got over the idea that if it was trimmed the hair ends would bleed. Yeck. Every day a little bit better, I keep telling myself.”

  Aside from those two incidents, it was one of your great days. We stayed into the night and built a fire of driftwood on the beach. A sea breeze kept the bugs away from us. We had stars by the billion. Meyer was in his best form. He came up with a tale I had never heard before, about a time years ago when he had attended a monetary conference in Tokyo. He was slated to deliver a paper he had written on the effect of interest rates on gross national product in the emerging nations. It was over an hour long. The taxi driver took him that morning to the hotel where he was to deliver his paper. Eager underlings led him to a big hall. He was pleased and surprised at the size of the audience. He gave his talk, shook hands with what seemed to be dozens of Japanese men, and left, still savoring the applause.

  That afternoon he was called before the executive committee. They wanted to know why he had failed to appear and deliver his paper. He said he had. They proved he hadn’t. He began to realize that he should have been made suspicious by the fact that the audience was entirely Japanese, quite a few of them were women, and, of the men who shook his hand afterward, not one of them thanked him in English. And he remembered a small elderly Japanese man who stood in the wings while he talked and kept looking at his watch in a troubled way.

  Meyer then told us of the lengths he went to to find the hotel again. He never found it. So he would never know whom he had talked to, or what they had expected. He had always remembered how their applause had warmed his heart. A polite people indeed.

  He did it well. He had Gretel chuckling and groaning a long time after he finished. When it was late, she made some chicken sandwiches for us to take along, so we could collapse into bed at the Resort.

  On the way back along the nine miles of lumps and potholes, I realized how ready I was for sleep.

  “You and Gretel make an extraordinary couple,” Meyer said, apropos of nothing at all.

  “How?”

  “Hard to describe, exactly. You give the impression of having been close for years. You are tuned to her in some fashion. The two of you look larger than life somehow. Of course, you are larger than couples one runs across every day. There is some sort of aura about you two. You had it in place when you came back down the beach that first day. I don’t know why it should, but it makes me feel drab.”

  “For a drab man, you tell a funny Japanese story.”

  “I felt compelled to do my best. She makes you want to dig deeply into your bag of tricks. With no insistence at all, she seems to demand some kind of excellence.”

  “I don’t happen to have any of that around.”

  “I think she thinks you do, or she wouldn’t bother.”

  “How is she bothering?”

  “Don’t you know how she looks at you?”

  “Okay, okay. Sure.”

  He sighed. “That fellow—what was his name?—Billy Howard. Billy must have been the prize damn fool of all the world.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t stand the pressure of her expectations—the need to be as much better than the next guy as she was better than the next woman.”

  “Interesting idea. The retreat from excellence. But she isn’t demanding excellence in that sense, Travis. All she demands is honesty, really.”

  “At this point in the life of McGee, how do I go about telling the truths from the lies? When I say something this time, how can I tell that I really mean it?”

  “If you can’t tell, we’re all in trouble.”

  “How so?”

  “In spite of your poses, old friend, you have a strange, tough, anachronistic sense of honor.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “You bleed over your despicable acts. But like our friend Rust Hills, you tiptoe past the edge of corruption in a naughty world, and you genuinely suffer if you do not live up to your own images of your various selves.”

  “Are you telling me I need not fear meeting the lady’s requirements?”

  “Whatever they might be, Travis. Whatever they might be.”

  “Look at that hole. You could hide a coffee table in that hole.”

  “Be careful. We have no spare, remember.”

  I wandered the road, finding the smooth parts, feeling underneath the deepwater tan the heat of the long May day in the sun. I had a stack of those old-fashioned photographic plates in the back of my mind. The big camera had been made of brass and oak. I had spent a lot of the day ducking under the black cloth, raising high the T stick with the magnesium powder in the groove along the top of the bar, focusing the big lens, waiting until she held still, then triggering the powder. Poom. And a cloud of white smoke, and another image of Gretel tucked away forever.

  Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image has become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go about with their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2’s and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep, reep, reep. A billion billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi, the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichicastenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Villefranche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, loo
king with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, “Mom, I don’t know any of these people. Or where these were taken even. There are jillions of them here in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?”

  “Throw them out, dear.”

  Fifteen

  I slept like a winter-bound bear and awoke refreshed to a morning of misty rain. Meyer was up and gone. He does not leave long chatty notes. This one said, 8:10. Bkfs dwnstrs. Then Dr. S.

  He was gone by the time I got downstairs. The waitress showed me to a table for two in a window corner of the small dining room. It looked out across the wet and empty courts. Between the far trees I could see segments of gray sea, almost flat calm.

  I ordered, and as I was drinking coffee, waiting for the food to arrive, I saw Jack the Manager appear in the arched doorway to the lobby. He wore a black sport shirt and white slacks. The shirt was strained across the round front of him. He stared at me. He looked like an emperor penguin disapproving of a dead fish.

  He came directly over to my table and said, “Mr. McGee!”

  “Good morning. Join me?”

  “I would like to point out—”

  “Sit down and point out. Please.”

  He eased into the chair facing me. He looked nervous and uncomfortable. “There have been complaints,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Your group was very noisy Friday night. And there have been two altercations in the parking area.”

  I nodded. “Of course. Shots were fired. Then all those tires screaming, and then the sirens. Very upsetting.”

  He looked slightly relieved. “I’m glad you’re taking this attitude. It makes it easier for me. Our guests are used to a—”

  “Just one moment,” I said, stopping him. I took out the pocket notebook which Meyer had convinced me was useful. I leafed through the pages, nodding to myself, frowning. When he started to speak, I stopped him with upraised hand.