by John Domini
The shadows changed shape, grew longer. Hartley’s muscles gave out on him, left him to sink. The gator’s face became indistinct. Didn’t move.
“Freak.” Hartley knew this was his last gasp. He tried to put some final power in the words. “Meat. I could have you. I could have all of you.”
Maybe eating the swamp dog had left the gator comatose. Maybe the eyes that terrified Hartley were already sightless with sleep, veiled by some filmy additional reptile’s lid. Or maybe the thing was sick. Yes. The alligator might have been dying of some gutty infection even as Hartley screamed for its rough body in the swamp. Who knows why? The soldier never got the comeuppance that had been sniping night and day at his nerves, the man-eating proof that he’d been so positive he could discover beyond AP, beyond TV.
He was a long time getting out. In his exhaustion the heavy suck of the mud against his boots seemed like home itself. He floated with just his eyes and nose above the water. But after the sky darkened, while the pool lost its heat, Hartley understood with great clarity that he would die in the Everglades. So much mapless space. Already he was starving. And the certainty of his death in some perverse way energized him. Hartley wrestled out of the muck, through the oppressive growth at the pool’s edge, back out onto the moonlit plains of saw grass. He never gave a thought or glance to the alligator. He began almost to run, moving half-blind across miles of open territory, a black and silver fit of searching for where he would die. Then Hartley stumbled onto a road.
As if the swamp weeds had been holding him up, he collapsed.
For the Park Security, the next morning, it was a simple matter to trace the officer, filthy and stone asleep though he was. He still wore his dogtags. The TV shooting schedule in his pocket was soaked but still legible. The only delay in his getting to Fort Pope came when the soldier insisted on making a phone call from the airport. He insisted on leaving word with the TV people that the man who drove the limousine should not be fired. Between sneezes and wretched phlegmy coughs, Hartley repeated into the phone that it was not the driver’s fault, not the driver’s fault. So the Park Security never got to tell the soldier that his wife would meet him at Fort Pope.
She had left Friday, Claire said. When she hadn’t been able to reach him in his hotel room, neither Wednesday night nor Thursday night, she’d left the kids with another officer. She’d taken the first plane south. In Fort Lauderdale, the hotel switchboard operator and one of the TV publicity crew had told the wife all—and she broke down, her tears staining the paper on which she’d written a numbered list of Hartley’s lies—all she needed to know.
“Now you tell me what happened,” she said through her teeth, through her tears. “The truth, Philip Hartley! The truth!”
He tried for days to win back her trust. He bought so many flowers it seemed the entire outpost was drenched in the bloomy smell. The orchids down here, especially, tore him up. Their petals were speckled and gummy, suggesting the spread arms of an octopus or some unknown brown amphibian, but hold one up in the least breeze and you’d see the flower was thin and shivery as paper. Hartley bought them from a Spanish kid who worked out of a tent nearby. Just a raggedy-ass kid who’d stand there singing “Flores, Flores, Flo-ri-da.”
The Return
Though Rucker had designed the house in New Canaan himself, and though he had designed it for every season in the long year, these past couple summers he had traveled to Cape Cod. His wife’s family owned beachfront property. She had pointed out that, since now Rucker was semi-retired anyway, the world would go on without him if he took off eight weeks solid. Rucker wore bowties and garters, and for thirty-nine years he’d worked as a stockbroker, but he had an open mind. His wife’s idea seemed like a way to celebrate his change of life. Therefore during June, this year and the last, he found a young couple to take care of his Connecticut house.
The first year he had seen as a lark. It had seemed like no time at all. This year however the time off felt always in some way wrong. The sun on the ocean was to him a nervewracking light. Either Rucker slept heavily in his own sweat, or he was overexcited, with each glance at the bright windows like a new cup of black coffee, Rucker started to go round angry. He slapped his youngest grandchild over a dropped spoonful of cereal. Then during the next-to-last week of vacation, he was called away from the Cape because the couple babysitting his New Canaan house had been shot.
Rucker insisted on going alone. He arranged the return so that he would arrive in the morning, and be done with the ugly business early. But once there it seemed as though no one could tell him anything he didn’t already know. He heard again that his house was handsome and unusual. He heard that the young couple hadn’t been married, that the woman was an astronomer with a telescope thrust out the attic window, that the man owned a sailboat and studied the music of the Renaissance, that the police didn’t like any of this. Rucker himself was still in what he knew was his traveling frame of mind, a heavy-headed mix of relief at getting away and shame about feeling relief. In this case, moreover, the mix had become painful. The aggravation of the sun on the sea was still too much a part of his thoughts, and also he could remember the outcry when he’d slapped his grandchild with the same overbearing clarity. As he listened to the police talk and talk, he crossed his arms over his lapels and declined to sit.
At last the murder itself was described to him. The couple had been led into the kitchen and shot there, apparently while standing holding on to each other.
Abruptly the tone of his experience in the police station changed. Rucker was shown a diagram. A detective made the explanations in an unnaturally loud voice. Rucker was shown a minute-by-minute chronology.
8:25—First three bullets fired.
8:25-8:35—Approximate time of death, male victim.
8:38-8:39—Second three bullets fired.
8:40—Approximate time of death, female victim.
Rucker saw ballistics reports. He saw computations of the angle of fall. Several times he found himself gasping and blinking and shaking his head, because under the rush of brutal data, without knowing it, he kept holding his breath. On the police diagrams the corpses were designated by dotted outlines.
Eventually Rucker understood that this preferential treatment, his being shown so many police documents, was out of respect for his age. When the detective at last fell silent, Rucker knew it was incumbent on him to say something.
But the stockbroker discovered then that his feelings had been let out—blown out—on a long, very thin line. They were miles away, years away, and he was unable to bring any of them in close enough for use. He attempted to concentrate, turning away from the detective and closing his eyes, but in the darkness all he could make out were the distant words for the emotions he should be going through, like kites up in winter weather. He opened his eyes to find himself facing the dotted heaps on the police diagram. If he turned around, he would have to face the detective.
“Violence,” Rucker managed at last, “horrible violence.”
Somehow the detective made this into a conversation.
“No mister,” he said. “No sir. This was an act with a motive. It was passion. The youth had another liaison going at the time.”
As a final formality, in order to keep police accounts regular, Rucker was shown the woman responsible. Had he ever seen her around the house? She was being held in a sort of fortified office, a room with both bulletproof windows and a coffee machine. She was a small, young woman. On her lap lay a book, the title of which was hidden under her fingers. From his great inner height, Rucker looked down at her youth, her book, and thought that he had never seen anyone so satisfied. The detective said she had turned herself in. Out of some obscene instinct to keep things businesslike, she had taken note of the exact time when she’d fired each shot and later informed the police. Now soon she would be retreating behind more windows, thicker than these and farther away. What could possibly cover such a distance? By the time she got out of jail Rucker
would be dead. He told them he had never seen her around the house.
He stayed in town for dinner, then stayed after dinner at the piano bar, listening to the songs. He set out for the house late, and couldn’t locate his driveway. After a while he realized he was driving with his lights off.
Later, he saw the young couple that had been babysitting his house. They were dancing, in his kitchen, between the uniquely-constructed counters, under the runners from which hung pans, serving forks, spatulas. He was very tired, but the noise of their dancing finally brought him downstairs. His wife had insisted they keep a revolver in the bedroom, and now Rucker came downstairs with the gun in his hand. This is how it’s done, he was telling himself anxiously; this is how I have to behave. Then when he saw them, dancing, he let his pistol hand drop and he leaned heavily against the kitchen door jamb.
Yet Rucker, such was his character…he believed there was a chance you could reason with these people. As he watched, the thought came to him, and he felt compelled to try. If you could call attention to their predicament, the dancing should stop. He moved into the kitchen, placing the gun on the counter that held the cereal bowls and unbreakable children’s cups, and he attempted to get between the two figures. Within their space the air was disturbed. The front of Rucker’s robe opened. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest to keep from shivering and peered into each face as it went past him. He called to the man, then the woman. The air grew colder. The long hairs on his chest and belly stirred. With enormous concentration, overcoming even his natural revulsion, his sadness and fatigue, Rucker persisted until finally a slackening and slight widening of their area let him know his presence had been felt. Immediately he asked if they knew where they were. Any telling question that came into his head, he asked. He asked if they knew what time it was; he asked if they knew who had done this to them; he asked if they knew the motive; he asked if they knew their way out; he asked if they felt any pain; he asked if they knew who they were. No answers were forthcoming. But the pair danced only haltingly now, and they were beginning to drift, mist over, quiver. Rucker sensed their unwillingness to complete the thoughts he’d started. He insisted. He asked if they knew who he was.
He would never have believed himself capable of such effort so late in the day.
The final trace to yield to him was their music. After that Rucker stood still a while where he was, in his silent and empty kitchen.
Then, though he had the thought that he must return to bed, he started to dance. He followed the rhythm of the couple’s music, which he found he could remember clearly, the notes rising uncalled-for to make the unshaved skin of his throat tremble. He danced a simple box step. In time his senses started to go dead on him, his feet numb, his tongue dry and thick. Nonetheless in another way he remained alert, as if some offshoot of his personality were permanently fired up by the idea of dancing. In this frame of mind Rucker recognized the couple’s song. He’d heard it before tonight. A popular ballad with an elegant melody, he’d heard it many times. And so the stockbroker understood that, since he’d already known the tune when the ghosts had first got him out of bed, the entire experience was cast into doubt. Yes he did have a mind—he glanced round his unusual kitchen—open to suggestion. Yet how could he stop dancing for this one prickle of uncertainty, when by his third or fourth refrain of the song Rucker had begun stepping through whole industrious colonies of tangled feelings, through swarms of emotion gathering close, close? Gently Rucker tried to sort these out. He identified the child’s exhilaration at being alone in his own house, the working-man’s relief and shame now like two file folders balanced neatly in a satchel, the grandfather’s desperation about the importance of rules, and the aging husband’s loneliness. But as Rucker pulled free each feeling from the tangle, others crowded into its place. Subtler creatures, crisscrossing masks and shreds of his inner life. With every dance step, more were felt pressing in round his cold legs, herded against his aching shoulders. At last Rucker understood that all the sensations of his long experience had this night joined together, in a motiveless musical triumph that was almost violent.
From time to time he caught his reflection in the polished cook-ware hanging overhead. He also looked out the kitchen window at the sky. He regarded the stars there. The light from those, he told himself calmly, has been traveling towards me since before my lifetime.
Laugh Kookaberry, Laugh Kookaberry, Gay Your Life Must Be
Much later on, long after Judgment Day, we remembered that a man had once passed through here and then returned, still living, to the world. Across the lightning and malefic smoke of Hell the news traveled. A human man! Only passing through!
Among all my fellow devils the one I most often conversed with, at this time of the news of the escaped man, was a polymorph named Miplip. I had no choice about talking with him. He was my overseer. In his natural state he possessed a hideous face: scaly, pendulous cheeks and a long nose with a circular tip and the nostrils on the tip. I had heard it said that the inspiration for his looks came from an ancient river turtle of South America, but this of course could not be, for Miplip had been created eons before either the turtle or the river in which, until Judgment Day, the creature had made its home.
He was my overseer. Still, still it rankles. In our Division there was Miplip and I, only we two, though there were visitors, and he—he was the one in charge. Everywhere devils work in twos; one must be in charge. Then why should it hurt so? Miplip, Miplip. Our relationship was oppressive.
Why did you argue with me, perpetually shaking your brittle cheeks? They made a rustling sound, and anyway I conceded every point, sooner or later. Why the heartless flaunting of your superiority? I concede: you have all the advantages. Don’t you think we have been at it together long enough for me to know? I concede that your tongue is longer than mine and that the inside of your mouth is a nastier yellow. I concede that your polymorphism dwarfs anything I am capable of. Then why should I be reminded, again and again? Miplip. The nagging. The nicknames. The shapes you sometimes assumed, just to delude me. The jokes far over my head. The remarks to others. Everywhere devils work in twos, and one must be in charge. Therefore I needed you; I could never be in charge. But what did you need, to cause me such pain?
Yet Miplip and I, like all other devils, discussed this new development (or rather, this newly-remembered old development): a man who had slipped our grasp and returned to the world unharmed. On some occasions Miplip and I were lucky; our conversation would be more of a discussion and less of a harangue. On other occasions, unlucky, the reverse. But we did talk, like all the others, and we asked those demons who came by what they thought. The general response was confused, halting, even pessimistic. Some avoided the question altogether, darting away before we had finished so much as a single sentence about the escaped man. A troubling situation, especially in the light of all the other worries we had been suffering recently. Then came the day that one of our regular visitors, a sightless demon whom Miplip and I both regarded as a friend, rendered himself invisible in order to escape us. After that, Miplip made a suggestion—a suggestion, as it turned out, of monumental proportions.
He had his tail curled about him at the time, and he sat on the air, maintaining levitation by a gentle flapping of his wings. He seemed unusually subdued. The blind devil’s exertions in bursting out of sight had left a brown stain on the air, just over Miplip’s head.
“Lover,” my overseer began quietly, though he was using one of his most offensive nicknames for me, “no one knows who this passerby was, as yet?”
“No one, Miplip.” I stood on a boulder nearby, disconsolately knocking off flinders with my fork into the damned below. That particular nickname, Lover, is so offensive to me because it is so duplicit. “But I have heard he had a guide, someone from among those already dead in his time. Yes, I think this is generally accepted as true now. He had a guide, from Limbo, just above us.”
“From Limbo.”
“A no
n Christian. Surely you know.”
I was pleased to be one up on him, and not a little surprised. But instead of sneering and challenging my news he continued to sit where he was, in silence. The brown stain faded and disappeared. When at last Miplip spoke, it was thoughtfully:
“We could make use of this man, Lover. The mere mention of him might make an excellent torture.”
I left off swinging at the chips of rock and turned to face him. “Look here, Miplip, it seems to me that ‘the mere mention’ of a human being who got away would be joyful news to these souls.”
To debate with him was pointless; innumerable experiences had taught me that I lacked even the shadow of a particle of a maggot of hope. He had won every argument since Lucifer’s Fall. And yet…once again I experienced the wretched excitement, the stirring of a spirit that will not be held still, the baffling resurgence of—what was it? It overwhelmed me, every time Miplip and I began to heave our opinions back and forth. Uselessly I struggled to keep quiet and let him say what he had to say. That scrambling monotony inside me took over. In the thrill of discovering that there were two points of view here, Miplip’s and my own, an eternity of lost arguments dropped out of my memory. In other words, I became an idiot.
“You say Miplip!” I shouted, banging the heel of my fork on the boulder. “You say he will cause pain?”
At that Miplip shook off his introspection. He laughed derisively, showing the yellow inside of his mouth. It was a nastier yellow than my own, and his tongue was much longer.
