Willing

by Scott Spencer

  You’ll be a million times warmer in the water than out here, Castle called out. He hopped off the deck and was ankle-high in the thermal drool. He bent down—his chest suddenly fleshy, loose—and scooped up handfuls of water, threw it on himself, his belly, his neck, his underarms.

  The lot of us were standing, shivering and uncertain, at the edge of the lagoon, while Castle beckoned us in. I hopped into the water. It felt like liquid silk, soothing yet disquieting. The sun’s skittering light reminded me of a lamp behind an immense fan, how the rotating blades continually cut into the rays. The water was completely opaque; I looked down and it seemed as if my legs ended just below the knee. The bottom was cool, with a sleek mineral slide to it, ground-up quartz and shale, milled and remilled of all impurities, a kind of wet talc, soft but unyielding. It didn’t have the elemental slurp and ooze of a river bottom nor the evolutionary clutter of an ocean’s floor.

  Castle, meanwhile, was gesturing ever more energetically, urging his crew into the lagoon. The Metal Men had already ventured in, and Romulus, looking worried, out of his element, like a man whose pride rested squarely on his feeling in control, was dangling one foot in, looking back over his shoulder at the women, whose conference had taken on more and more animation.

  I was looking directly at the four other men, for no other reason than they happened to be at the compass point toward which I was heading. The huge angry baby of a man had his hand on the back of the darkest of the quartet, grazing the edge of the hair-pierced Virgin. The man with the scarred shoulders was nodding emphatically. And it was exactly then, with a fateful mental ping, that I realized these four guys were hatching a plan, and that the plan was going to involve violence, and that we globe-trotting johns were going to be the object of that violence. These men, I sensed, were either the fathers, uncles, brothers, or lovers of some of Castle’s escorts, and they were here to avenge the honor of the women or of their family.

  I think we’re about to have some trouble, I said to Castle.

  Castle splashed some water on me and then feinted left and right, like a boxer daring me to retaliate. I raised my voice, hoping the four men wouldn’t hear, though by now they had stopped the Dawn of the Dead slog toward the fountain of steam. They had turned around to openly stare directly at us. There’s some guys here, I said. Big angry fucking mean-looking guys. That woman with Jordan? I think one of them is her father or uncle or something.

  Despite my alarm, seemingly nothing could stop Castle from jamming the heel of his hand onto the water’s surface and launching a gallon or two of it in my direction. I dodged most of it, though a bit of healing water hit my forehead. I don’t think you understand, I said. These guys…

  Yeah, yeah, these guys, Castle said. I’ve been watching them. I don’t think in Iceland we’re going to have any trouble. Other places we’ve gone, we’ve had little incidents here and there. What kind of incidents? I asked. Well, you know, jealous boyfriends, troublemakers, usually young guys who maybe resent a little that some older Americans come in and scoop up all the most fabulous women. We had that trouble in Prague, once. But Reykjavik has always been smooth sailing. Those guys really look as if they’re up to something, I said. Castle shrugged. What am I supposed to do? This is a public place.

  Romulus, the Metal Men, Sean Westin, and Jordan were in the water. Most of the women, I noticed, had disappeared. The one who was with Sean, a cheerful-looking girl with frosted pink nails and her hair in ringlets, ran back to where they had been standing, retrieved a towel that had been dropped onto the deck, and quickly made her way toward the changing rooms. There were an awful lot of canaries dropping dead in the coal mine.

  By now the four men had disappeared. The spot in which they were standing was taken by an elderly couple, who moved with their arms extended as if trying to keep their balance on a tightrope. They had slathered so much magic mineral salt onto their faces, shoulders, and arms, they looked as if they were prepared for some aboriginal rite of passage.

  Jordan, I noticed, had disappeared, too, but then, just as I noted that, he burst through the surface of the water, gasping for breath, his arm flailing. A moment later, the man with the Madonna tattoo rose up as well, grabbing Jordan around the throat and pulling him under the water again. I tried to shout out, but someone gripped my ankles and a gasp later I was upended. The supposedly healing waters were choking me now, rushing up my nose, into my mouth, and all the while I was also being punched in the side of the head, the face. I blindly tried to grab hold of whoever was doing this to me, but my swings were panicked, aimless, as were my kicks. My face was pressed against the lagoon’s flaxen floor, and now I was swallowing sand, too. A foot was placed at the back of my neck, at which point this most remarkable fact began to impress itself upon me: someone was trying to end my life.

  In some inchoate way, I was never more firmly on my own side than I was at that moment, never more convinced of my right to live, to thrive, to vanquish my enemies. I tried to stand up—in fact, I think I did make it to my feet for a moment—but I was tackled again, and this time he, whoever he was, sat on my back and pressed my head down with his hands. I wondered furiously why no one was coming to my rescue, but something akin to an inner voice had begun to command me, a calm, authoritative voice that instructed me not to waste precious time wishing for intervention when clearly none was forthcoming. Best to twist away if you can, he’ll lose his balance, the voice suggested. It was urgent but calm, this voice; if I had been a different sort of man, I might have mistaken it for the voice of God. I managed to twist away and my attacker floated off of me, but not before pummeling me with his heels and clawing at me, as well—he caught the inside of my ear, which promptly began to bleed, sending a latticework of red threads into the milky blue water. Then the idiot bastard sat on me again. This time he’d figured it out a little better; he was more centered. It felt as if the weight of a grand piano had been placed on me. I felt flattened out, and now it seemed that I wouldn’t be able to get him off of me, which awakened in my dying heart not a sense of panic, or even any particular urgency, but a great sonorous sadness. Poor Avery. Drowned in Iceland, of all places. Somehow, even riding the downward trajectory of this surrendering self-pity, I found the strength to corkscrew my upper body and grabbed onto the hard hairy leg of the murderous man on top of me. I don’t understand how women can tolerate having a man on top of them; it’s really unpleasant. I sank my teeth into the hairy softness of his thigh, biting down with all my savage strength. I heard his muffled and distant howl through the water, and I continued to bite and even grind my teeth back and forth to maximize the pain I was causing.

  A moment later, his weight was off of me, but I didn’t ease up on my bite. I was on my knees now, still chewing away at my attacker, who was pounding on my back and screaming, grabbing my hair, trying to work his fingers into my eyes. I tasted his blood spurting into my mouth, salty and oily, abhorrent. Even as he attempted to gouge out my eyes my attacker was trying to get away from me, and I opened my jaws, let him go, just as one of the Metal Men grabbed me under the arms and pulled me up.

  A little greasy circle of blood was around me, round as a lifesaver.

  Castle was helping Sean, who was hyperventilating and bleeding from the nose.

  What passed for security in this place, a stocky girl with Heidi pigtails, a teenage boy with acne on his back, and the grizzled old veteran of many long dark winters who sold us our admission tickets, had finally arrived, but when the man with the Madonna tattoo and his band of vigilantes scrambled out of the water, and onto the deck, the lagoon’s employees made no attempt to apprehend them, and when they hurried off, through the warming house, past the changing rooms, down the long windowless corridor leading to the entranceway and the parking lot, no one made an attempt to slow them down, no one followed after.

  In my little group, there was chaos, everyone speaking at once. And how not? We had been attacked! By madmen! Someone took our measure and wanted to do us a
great deal of harm, not only to terrorize but to annihilate us. Jordan’s injuries, Romulus’s long lonely nights, Sean’s essential good nature, my nights on the sofa, my having refrained from actual intercourse with anyone in Iceland—all of it meaningless to them. These men had come here with the sole purpose of inflicting pain on us, making us suffer, perhaps even taking our lives. And not only that; they had gone to the trouble of driving out to this otherwise deserted lagoon, paid their admission, gotten their little tickets, had their tickets torn, walked into the changing room and put on their trunks, and then waited in the so-called healing waters for who knows how long for us to appear. How they must hate us! All that trouble, all that inconvenience, not to mention the risk. The vehemence and single-mindedness of their hatred whipped us, its collective object, into a frenzy; we were all speaking at once, overgesturing, turning this way, that way, pointing here, there, no there, there, no there, there for Chrissakes, not really making that much of whatever cuts and bruises we had incurred, anesthetized as we were by the adrenaline rush.

  As for me, the taste of blood was still in my mouth. I waded back into the lagoon, cupped a handful of the healing waters, and shamelessly squished it around my mouth and spat it out. And as the pinkish stream splashed into the lagoon, I felt not only the bright shining exhilaration of having survived but an almost equal happiness that at least a few pages of my book had just, for all intents and purposes, written themselves. This was better than finding fifteen Airedale pups sleeping in a urine-soaked cardboard box in a puppy mill in Concord calling itself Longacre Meadows; this was better than that moment in the Florida retirement community when I happened to be having lunch with the president of the owners’ association and his wife walked into the kitchen wearing a bright turquoise terrycloth robe and tearfully informed him that their drug-addicted nephew, who had been staying with them over the past few days, had disappeared with all of her jewelry.

  Castle was not saying much. He was stroking his chin and gazing out at the ring of lunar peaks surrounding the lagoon. He looked haggard, unlucky, like a gambler staring at the roulette table after all his chips have been raked off. He was calculating his losses.

  12

  YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT getting out of Iceland as soon as possible was an easy decision, even if it did suggest we were capitulating to the men who had terrorized us at the Blue Lagoon. But for the men who hadn’t been with us, who had skipped the side trip, probably because they were having too much fun with the women they had chosen, the idea of heading on to our next stop without fully exhausting the time that had been allotted for Reykjavik was completely unacceptable. Even when Castle and Gabrielle assured the group that Oslo would be every bit as pleasurable as Reykjavik, a few of the guys continued to grumble, though, really, it was mainly Webb Doleack. Well that’s fucking ridiculous, he said to the group, which Castle had convened in one of the Royal’s conference rooms. If you’d been there, Sean Westin said, and seen those animals. But Doleack was not one to be reasoned with. If I’d been there, I guarantee you none of that shit would have gone down. He shook his head, clearly meaning that those of us who had weathered the attack had not been able to sufficiently defend ourselves, which amounted to not only a failure of nerve and will but a kind of national disgrace.

  What about finding those monkeys and teaching them a lesson? Doleack asked the group. It didn’t strike me as much of an idea; I was chewing gum to get the taste of blood out of my mouth. But Linwood, who hadn’t really been hurt but whose pride was injured—only he knew for sure what cataclysms of fear he felt back in the blue water—went along with Webb’s plan. We could contract it out, he said. There must be all kinds of people who we could give a few hundred bucks to, and they’d gladly take care of the whole thing.

  Okay, then, gentlemen, Castle said, ignoring both Doleack and Linwood, we will meet in the main lobby at eight o’clock this evening, and we shall be in Oslo in time for iced vodka, smoked salmon, and…other delicacies.

  Gabrielle raised her hand. May I say something please? Of course you can, my dear. Castle made a low sweeping bow. The important thing, she said, is we are all okay and now we go on our way. I want to tell you gentlemen how great you all are being. As she spoke, Castle stroked his chin and nodded his head in agreement. You are the most fantastic group ever, without doubt. With this incident, it’s been a challenge—but also an adventure. At this, Castle nodded even more vigorously, though there was something frozen in his smile, and Sean, who was standing next to me, singsonged out of the side of his mouth, Someone feels a lawsuit coming on. And so, Gabrielle continued, we enjoy these last two hours and a half here, and then off we go quickly to Norway for the best time yet. And as a very special promotion, Lincoln has arranged—she glanced at Castle and he put up four fingers—four brand-new companions for any of you who would like to meet someone new before we leave to Oslo. Isn’t that great? To which one of the Metal Men shouted back That’s great, Gabby, but we’re still going to sue your ass. There was general laughter, and Gabrielle—Gabby? when did that happen?—gave him the thumbs-up.

  Do you call her Gabby, too? I asked Sean, to which he shrugged, nodded. Jesus, I said, it’s like with Jordan, everyone’s calling him Jordy. And that’s a problem? Sean asked.

  Gabrielle had her hands up in the air. Her confidence about addressing the group was increasing, and she was one of those people for whom an increase in confidence meant speaking more loudly and gesturing broadly. Would you like to see your new companions? she called out. Are you all ready to take a look at the new recruits Lincoln and I have brought in for you? The response to her urgings was a little flat, though agreeable. A few Yeahs and a scatter of applause. Len Cobb, standing behind me, clapped his hard hands together. They made a loud, hollow sound, like a basketball bouncing in an empty gymnasium.

  I was standing next to a compact man with a small sunburned nose and close-cropped colorless hair. He looked like a farm implements salesman or, what he in fact was, a pilot whose career hadn’t quite gelled, probably because of personal difficulties—alcoholism, contentiousness. Bring them in already, for Chrissakes, he said softly. Don’t make such a big production out of it. He wore a blue jacket with white piping and a little pair of silver wings pinned over the breast pocket. He was freshly shaved, and the tang of his aftershave lotion mixed with the smell of beer on his breath. I’m Beau Clark, he said, I’m your pilot, and that little sonofabitch over there—he pointed to another smallish man, standing next to Piedmont—is my brother Francis, who’s flying with me, though if you were to ask him he’d say I was flying with him. Oh, I see, I said, extending my hand. Well, thanks for the ride. You’re very welcome. Pretty good plane they’ve got us on? I asked, as if I might have a special interest in and knowledge of aviation. Oh, the plane’s great, he said, with a bit of teasing in his voice. I like to bust Linc’s balls, but you want to know the truth? I nodded. Truth is, flying Fleming is always a good experience. The clientele. What about the clientele? I wondered. But that’s all he said: the clientele, as if the men who came on these tours were legendarily great guys. And from a flying viewpoint, he said, not only do you get well-maintained equipment, but it’s basically a series of short hops with plenty of down time in between. Sounds great, I said, though I noticed he didn’t say new equipment, but well-maintained, which suggested fairly old machines, lovingly tinkered over and kept aloft.

  Oh, it’s great, all right, he said, make no mistake about that. My brother and I will always be grateful to Mr. Castle. He took a chance on us when no one else in the industry would. Beau then watched with obvious pleasure as the color fled from my face, and then he laughed and gave me a playful bop on the shoulder. You should have seen your face, he said, and then, calling out to his brother, he said Hey, Francis, how you doing over there? Francis gave him a little salute, and then Beau pointed up at the ceiling, which I took to mean they had to begin making preparations—but for what? The upcoming flight to Norway or a bit of debauchery? Francis tapp
ed the face of his watch, nodded, and moments later the two brothers walked out of the ballroom together.

  Soon after Beau and Francis were gone, the door opened again and the four previously unviewed Icelandic women came in. I felt some terrible mixture of despair and quickening interest. They marched in single file, like four waitresses coming in for the dinner shift. The first in line, who could not have been more than twenty years old, with some childish plumpness still in her heart-shaped face, waved at the men with a kind of hyper vigor, like someone in a rowboat signaling for help. A few of the men waved back at her. It was all a bit of a joke. She stretched her mouth into a large, comic smile, which looked half a parody of happiness and half a grimace of fear. As to the other women—the first in a busily patterned pantsuit, with a sensible haircut and the soft sorrowful gaze of a hospice volunteer; the second gaunt in a dark blue dress, worn with fishnet stockings and square-toed shoes; and the third, with powerful calves and heavy thighs, in an absurdly short denim skirt—they each had the air of someone who knows her time is being badly used, but who is required to go through the motions nevertheless.

  Dr. Gordon had his hand on Jordan’s arm and was pushing him to the edge of our group. Jordan’s resistance was undercut by his fealty to his father’s commands. Come on, Dad, he was saying. I’m okay with how it is now. Don’t be absurd, Dr. Gordon said, his voice shimmering with scorn. She was in on it, and you know it. He shook his son’s arm. Now, look, that young one there, you see her? You better make a move before someone else snaps her up. Dad, Jordan pleaded. But Dr. Gordon gave him a shove, and Jordan stumbled toward the women.