Lights Out

by Peter Abrahams

  “Name?”

  “Ed Nye.”

  The receptionist picked up her phone. “A Mr. Ed Nye to see you.” Eddie heard a voice on the other end: harsh, loud, metallic. The receptionist hung up and said: “Very last door on your right.”

  Eddie went past her, into a short corridor. There were only two doors to choose from; perhaps the receptionist fantasized herself part of a big operation. The first was closed and had “Senor Colon” on the front. The second was open. Eddie walked in.

  An old man was sitting with his feet up on his desk. The soles of his shoes were worn; so were the carpet, the desk, his face, his eyes. A white-mesh screen covered his throat.

  “Mr. Brice?”

  The old man took his feet off the desk, tugged at the mesh screen, and replied. At least, his lips moved and sound came from him, harsh, loud, metallic. Eddie understood none of it.

  The old man pointed to the white mesh and spoke again. His mouth, lips, tongue, all moved to shape words, but the sound came from whatever was under the mesh screen. This time Eddie caught most of it. “Sawbones took my larynx, Mr. Nye. Got to listen close.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Siddown.”

  Eddie sat, laying the backpack on the floor.

  “What can I do for you?” the old man said. The voice was amplified, mechanical, like a robot’s; at the same time, there was something disembodied about it, which made Eddie think of the oracle in a book of Greek legends he’d read.

  “You’re William Brice?”

  “I am.”

  “My name’s Ed Nye.”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “Maybe not,” Eddie said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “How long?”

  “Fifteen years. My brother hired you to find someone.”

  Brice wore thick glasses. Behind them were little brown eyes that watched Eddie’s face. He inhaled sharply, like a singer getting ready for a hard note. “And did I?” he said.

  “No. But I’d like to know how far you got.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m still looking for him.”

  “Your brother should have anything like that. I always send a case summary, win or lose.” Brice took a raspy gulp of air, short of breath, as though the machine in his throat was exhausting his supply.

  “I’d like a copy of it,” Eddie said, “if your records go back that far.”

  “I got records of every case. Thirty-six years.” Brice sucked in another deep breath. “But I don’t give them away.”

  “How much?”

  The little brown eyes looked Eddie up and down, as though assessing his net worth. Eddie’s net worth was right there on the floor of Brice’s office: $488,220.

  “Fifty bucks,” Brice said.

  “Okay.”

  “What’s your brother’s name?”

  “J. M. Nye. Jack.”

  Brice picked up his phone, held the speaker halfway between his throat and his mouth. “Rita? Bring me the file on Jack or J. M. Nye.” He hung up, leaned back in his chair. “So who are you looking for?”

  “A drug smuggler from the Bahamas.”

  “No shortage of those. What’s special about this one?” Another raspy breath.

  “He committed a crime that someone else paid for.”

  There was a pause, but brief. “Someone else like you?”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Thought so. Moment you came in.” The words, amplified and mechanical, had an official sound, like an announcement over a loudspeaker. “How much time did you do?”

  “All of it.”

  “How much was all.”

  “Fifteen years.”

  This pause was longer. “That means you just got out.”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe I could take a gander at the fifty bucks.”

  “First we’ll see if you’ve got anything,” Eddie said.

  “I got something. I got something on every case.” Brice glanced down at the backpack. “What’s this drug smuggler’s name?”

  “Kidd,” said Eddie. “But we didn’t know that at the time. All we knew then was his nickname.”

  “What was it?”

  “JFK.”

  Brice sat straighter in his chair, just a little, and lowered his gaze. His hand went to the desk drawer, opened it, took out a pack of cigarettes. He lit one, inhaled deeply, blew smoke. Some came through his nose and mouth, some through the white-mesh screen.

  “Now do you remember?” Eddie said.

  Brice shook his head. “Kind of a funny nickname, that’s all.”

  The brassy-haired woman came through the door carrying a file, stopped dead. “God in heaven,” she said. “Look what you’re doing.”

  Brice glanced down at the cigarette in his hand, then glared at her. “I got a client in here, Rita.” A blue wisp curled through the mesh screen. She dropped the file on the desk and left without another word.

  “Not married, are you?” Brice asked.

  “No.”

  “Neither’s Rita, soon as her next divorce goes through.” Eddie didn’t respond. Brice opened the file. There was a single sheet of lined yellow notepad paper inside. Handwriting filled the top third. The rest was blank. It didn’t seem like a lot for Mr. Trimble’s thousand dollars.

  “That’s it?” Eddie said.

  Brice looked up from the file. “The investigation was unsuccessful, as you said.”

  “You must have discovered something.”

  Brice closed the file. “Not a thing.”

  “Or eliminated some possibilities. Even that could help.” Eddie dug some bills out of his pocket, counted out fifty dollars, laid it on the desk.

  Brice put his hand on the file. “Does your brother know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Plan to see him?”

  “No.”

  “Know where he is?”

  “I don’t know what’s on your mind, Brice. My brother’s dead.”

  “You kill him?”

  The next thing Eddie knew he was on his feet, standing over the old man.

  “Don’t,” said Brice. The tone was harsh and commanding, but that was just the machinery; his eyes were full of fear.

  Eddie didn’t touch him. He just picked up the file and took it to the window. Down on the street a cop was tucking a parking ticket under the windshield wiper on Jack’s car. Eddie withdrew the single sheet of paper from the file and read it.

  The date was on the top line. Then:

  Nye, Jack. Intview #1.

  Retainer $250-bank check.

  Brother-Eddie (Edw. Nicholas) 5-15 drugs (mj)

  Atty.-Glenn Weems, Smith amp; Weems, Ft. L. (who $$$?)

  Nds. dvlp. new evdnce re: “JFK”

  Bahamas-Saint Amour-Galleon Bch.

  DEA-tip? Eddie N.-enemies? J. N. says no.

  What about “JFK” as poss. enemy? Doesn’t kn.

  “JFK” had mj patch.

  But

  That was all.

  “Where’s the rest of it?” Eddie said, moving in front of the desk.

  Brice shook his head.

  “But these are just your notes from the first meeting. It doesn’t say what you did or where you went.”

  “I didn’t do anything, didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Why not?” Eddie ran his eyes over the page again. “And I know he paid you a grand, not two-fifty.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this.”

  “But,” Eddie said. The word that closed the file.

  “But your brother’s dead, so maybe you have a right to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That I was just following his directions.”

  Eddie didn’t understand; all the same, the icy feeling crept across his back and up his neck.

  “And two-fifty was all he gave me, I don’t know about any grand.”

  “Gave yo
u to do what?” Eddie said.

  “Nothing. He said money had been raised and it had to be spent”-Brice gasped for air-“but that you and this JFK were partners-he grew it, you ran it-and you were as guilty as he was. So no confession from him would do you”-another gulp of air-“any good.”

  Eddie backed into the chair in front of the desk, almost sat down.

  “You’re lying,” he said. His legs didn’t want to hold him up. He made them.

  Brice shook his head. “When you mentioned JFK it all came back. I couldn’t forget a thing like that.” Pause for breath. “Only time it happened in thirty-six years.” Brice’s gaze went to the fifty dollars on the desk, then to Eddie. “JFK was lying low in Nassau, according to your brother. I guess your fifty buys that much.” He took another deep breath, but said no more.

  Eddie folded the sheet of yellow paper, stuck it in his pocket, picked up the backpack. He remembered Brice’s letter-“our best efforts to locate the individual known as JFK have to this point in time been unsuccessful”-and didn’t think he owed Brice a penny, but he left the money where it was. He didn’t want to touch it.

  Rita looked up from her magazine as he went by.

  “Can you believe him?” she said. “I tell him, ‘Pa, how can you still smoke after everything that happened to you?’ He just ignores me. He’s such an idiot, sometimes.”

  “That’s one of his minor flaws,” Eddie said.

  30

  Do most lives turn on one crucial event? Eddie didn’t think so. But some did-the Mariner’s for one, and his own for another. Now, after talking to Brice, Eddie knew that he didn’t understand his own crucial event any better than he did the Mariner’s. His imprisonment wasn’t simply the result of bad luck and a twisted chain of circumstance, as he had always thought. That left a lot of questions, questions that Jack could have answered.

  The twin-engine Piper followed its shadow southeast across a sea smooth as Jell-O. Blue marked deep water, green the sandy shallows, red-brown the coral heads. A long white cruiser cut across the surface on the same course as the plane, like a tab opening a zipper. The shadow of the plane darkened the boat and left it behind.

  “There’s beer in the cooler,” the pilot called from the cockpit.

  “No, thanks,” Eddie said.

  “Mind grabbing one for me?” Pause. “Little joke.”

  The pilot looked back at Eddie to see if he got it. He had watery eyes and a puffy face; perhaps the cooler was for the return trip, solo.

  “Good thing,” Eddie said. “I’m with the National Safety Board.”

  There was no talk after that. The Bahamas appeared like emeralds on blue velvet, and soon came Saint Amour, as he remembered it, banana shaped and outlined in white. The pilot descended, banked, flew so low that Eddie could see a manta ray gliding below the surface, then skimmed down over pine tops and touched down on the strip, now paved, bounced a few times, and rolled to a stop.

  Taking the backpack, Eddie got out. He felt the heat right away. It opened his pores, worked itself deep inside, slowed him down. You on island time now.

  He looked around. Except for the pavement on the strip, nothing had changed, not the scrub forest, the still air, the floral smells. The strip was deserted but for a single crab sidestepping down the center. Eddie hoisted the pack on his back, crossed the strip, and started down the dirt road. Behind him, the plane gathered speed, roaring as it rose into the sky, then throbbing, then buzzing, then making no sound at all. A big brown bird rose from the trees, orange legs tucked up against its tail. Eddie could hear the heavy wings beating the air.

  In five or ten minutes, he came to the flamboyant tree that marked the path leading to JFK’s marijuana patch. The path was gone, lost in a coiling growth of creeper and bush. But the flamboyant tree seemed much bigger, its red-flowered branches now reaching across the road, dappling the sun. He had a strange thought: This would be the place to bury Jack.

  Eddie walked on, and a verse of the poem came to him, as though his mind were a CD player programmed on shuffle.

  The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.

  But Jack, it turned out, hadn’t been beautiful, and he himself didn’t feel slimy. Where were all these beautiful dead people? Louie? The Ozark brothers? Paz’s driver? All dead, none beautiful. Killing might be wrong, but not because of some inherent beauty in the species. Where was it? In Tiffany? Sookray? Paz? El Rojo? No. Not in Gaucho either. Childhood and beauty were not the same; he remembered how he had fallen through the ice in his hockey skates. Then he thought of Karen, how she had kissed him and said, “I’m attracted to you, and I haven’t been attracted to anyone in a long time. Remember that, no matter what happens.” And despite what had happened, despite the fact that she’d been working to bring his brother down, Eddie couldn’t fit her into this new and dismal scheme of things.

  The road swung right, toward the sea. He could see patches of it framed by the trees, flashing shapes of blue and gold, like abstract art on the move. He was sweating now; it dripped off his chin the way it had the last time he’d walked this road. The dead pig had weighed much more than $488,220, but he hadn’t been wearing Jack’s winter clothes. He stopped, took off the sweater, rolled up the shirt-sleeves, kept going.

  A salty breeze curled across the road. Eddie still hadn’t seen anyone. The island might have been deserted and he a real-life equivalent of Sir Wentworth Staples, watching for a galleon through the trees. The illusion grew stronger and stronger, and with it came the idea of making a life here. Then he heard the thwack of tennis balls.

  Eddie shifted the pack on his back, walked a little faster, recalling the red clay court that lay ahead, with its sun-bleached backboard and damp and dark equipment shed. Just ahead: behind that line of scrub pines.

  But as Eddie drew closer he saw they were all gone: the dried-out clay court, the cracked backboard, the tumbledown shed. Instead there was an arched gate with a sign: “Pleasure Island Tennis Club”; and through it the sight of a dozen green all-weather courts, a clubhouse with a deck, and suntanned people in tennis outfits. Lots of them: lounging on the deck with drinks, drilling with the pros on the center courts, playing doubles on the side courts.

  Eddie didn’t enter the gate. He stayed on the road, paved now and hot under his shoes, as it angled closer to the sea. He knew he was near the old fish camp, close enough, he thought, to hear the ocean. But all he heard was the whine of high-pitched engines. Then he came to the row of casuarinas that shielded the fish camp from the road. He walked through them and saw that the fish camp too was gone. In its place was a go-cart track. Three white kids fishtailed around the far turn, not far from the spot where Jack’s cabin had stood. A black man gassing carts at the side of the track glanced up at Eddie.

  Eddie followed the road to its end at Galleon Beach. The beach itself was the same, if you ignored the ranks of glistening bodies flopped on chaises longues. But where the six waterfront cottages, thatch-roofed bar and central building with office, kitchen, dining room, and the Packers’ suite had been, there now stood a slab hotel eight stories high. Behind the hotel Eddie saw fairways, sand traps, greens, and in the distance clusters of white squared-off villas like a hard-shelled growth on the hillsides. Brad Packer’s blueprint had come to life.

  “Take your bag, suh?”

  A boy in a blue polo shirt with the words “Pleasure Island” on the chest was beside him.

  “I’m not staying,” Eddie said.

  “Land-crab race tonight, suh.” The boy looked up at him with unblinking eyes.

  Eddie smiled. “Who owns this place?”

  “Big, big company.” The boy spread his hands.

  “What’s it called?”

  The boy thought. “United States company,” he said.

  “You from this island?” Eddie said.

  The boy nodded.

  “
Know a man named JFK?”

  The boy took a step back.

  “He’s an old friend,” Eddie said. “I’d like to see him.”

  “Ol’ frien’?” said the boy, backing away some more.

  “What’s wrong?” Eddie said.

  “He got AIDS.”

  “I know.”

  “You got it too?”

  “No.”

  The boy relaxed a little.

  “Where is he?” Eddie said.

  “Down to Cotton Town.” The boy pointed south.

  “How far is that?”

  “Far,” said the boy, “except when the jitney carry you.”

  “Where do I get the jitney?”

  The boy pointed his chin at the hotel.

  Eddie went inside. There was a newsstand, a gift shop, a bar. A big-bellied man wearing nothing but a bathing suit and a straw hat sat on a stool with a drink in his hand. “I’m gettin’ smashed on Goombay smash,” he said to the bartender. “Is that funny or what?”

  The bartender smiled, but her eyes were expressionless.

  The big-bellied man leaned over the bar. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  Eddie, walking to the reception counter, missed her reply.

  No one was at the counter. Eddie rang the bell. A door opened and a woman came out. She was a big woman, perhaps twenty pounds overweight, with short frosted hair, plucked eyebrows, and a face that had spent too long in the sun. She wore a name pin on her white blouse: “Amanda,” it said, “Assistant Manager.”

  “Checking in?” she asked, noticing the backpack.

  “No,” Eddie replied. “When’s the next jitney to Cotton Town?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She was staring at his face. “You look like someone I used to know,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Eddie said, feeling in his pocket for money to pay the fare.

  “And sound like him too.” She tilted her head to one side, revealing a wrinkled line at the base of her neck. “I couldn’t forget those eyes. You’re Eddie Nye, aren’t you? Jack’s brother.”

  “That’s right,” he said, looking at her face again, hardened and thickened by the sun, and not placing her.

  “Have I changed that much?” the woman said.

  His eyes went to her name pin: Amanda. “Mandy?”