Long Shot

by Paul Monette

She sidestroked through the quiet cove to the ladder in the rock. She reached an arm up to pull herself out of the water, then climbed and swung from the second step, her legs still dangling in the sound below. She hung by her hands for a long moment—the breeze on her naked back, the coral rough of the rock against her palms—trying to think of something else but Jasper. She swayed like a pendulum, back and forth. At the end of the arc she bumped against something hollow, knocking it off the wall. It landed below her with a splash. An instant later, one hand let go of the ladder. She held on like somebody on a trapeze and reached around in the dark water. Whatever it was, it must have sunk.

  Then her knuckles scraped against metal, and the sudden touch brought back a wave of memory. She dropped to the water and landed close. It was just a bucket—a brittle raw aluminum, with a rim of cork at the bottom to float it. It had hung on an iron hook in the rock for as long as she’d been coming here. She got her hands on it bobbing about and felt it all over. Her mother had used it to gather clams from the sandy floor under the cliff. Yet the overwhelming recollection here was not in the mother-and-daughter direction. The dead were as dead as ever. What seized her instead was a ravenous hunger for Harrington clams.

  She put a hand to her throat and gripped the yellow diamond, then flipped and did a deep dive, forgetting her hair. It was only five feet of water, six at most, but she had to squish the sand between her fingers several times before she got one. Bolting up, she dropped the clam in the bucket as she gulped a draught of air. Then down again. In a while, she had half a dozen, enough for a midnight snack, when she stroked back over to the ladder to put the diamond out of danger. She had to shed it to free both hands. Treading water, she unclasped the chain from around her neck. Then climbed up level with the iron hook. As she hung it there, clicking the clasp together again, it seemed to wink dully in the darkness once, like a fallen star. For the moment she wasn’t a Willis at all.

  She made for the bottom again and again. She didn’t really need a dozen, since they didn’t taste half so good the next day, and besides, she wasn’t hungry. But it wasn’t logic that got her into all of this, and she paid no mind to reasons. By now, she was too out of breath to stay down more than a couple of seconds at a time. A band of white was pulsing in her head. She nearly tipped the bucket once—the next time cracked her head on it coming up. Half drowned, but she got all twelve. And twelve was what they always used to have when they sat at the cedar table having a feast of clams.

  She gripped the rim of the bucket, her chin propped up on the cork. She wondered idly if the clam knives had survived. If they weren’t in the white tin cabinet by the stove, she couldn’t think how she’d eat her catch. The sea birds dropped their clams and smashed them on the rocks. She could always resort to a hammer, of course, but the thrill of it was eating them alive. Razored open with the proper tool, they split to reveal the muscle whole—peach-colored, quivering, scalloped—and they fought back when they were chewed, in a final undersea reflex all their own. She hadn’t thought of the eating part in years. It was as if the memory only occurred in stages, step by step as she followed along. Just now, it seemed that nothing else she’d ever eaten since had tasted quite so new.

  She drifted about for a moment more, to recover her strength before she moved to lift the bucket up the ladder. She wished the night would double, somehow, and lengthen out this still and private time in which she could simply draw a blank. When she was done with all of this, she could use eight hours of sleep before the sun came up again. Out in the water, the dark took away those minor things that got too close around her, even in Bermuda. Only an hour ago, she began to see she was moving into something new. She could feel it gather in the wide black air like a change of weather.

  Something to do with Jasper.

  When the lamp went on in the parlor up at the house, she didn’t get scared at first. She was looking up the slope toward a windy grove of sea pines just in front of the cottage porch. She could see them roll their branches in the westerly breeze. The sudden glow of the lamp broke through the night like a burst of fire and put the house on the map again. More than anything else, she felt betrayed. If she wasn’t safe here to be all alone, then there wasn’t a place, not anywhere. Even the middle of the ocean wasn’t as far as it used to be.

  One by one, the rooms in her mother’s house lit up. She supposed it had to be one of the servants, since who else knew she was even here? She clearly wasn’t thinking straight. The house hadn’t had any live-in help in the whole eight years that she’d been married. All but a week in April, the house was shuttered up. But wasn’t there still a caretaker down the road, halfway to St. George’s, who kept the keys of a couple of dozen millionaires? Or the outdoor man, perhaps, who did maintenance once a week? Well, no. They’d never drop by so late, or not without getting paid extra. Only last week, she had called from New York on two days’ notice. The banker who handled her trust hustled up a maid and an underchef from the Princess. They’d been in and out all weekend, but today she let them go and fixed herself a salad, so it wasn’t any of them.

  She was scared, all right. She put an arm through the handle and made her way up the stone rungs slowly. At the top, she swung the bucket up and plopped it down in the ice plant. Then she scrambled up after. The blazing house awaited her, and she tried to believe it was nothing more than an island drunk, rifling her clothes for a little cash. Or a couple of teen-age lovers tired of going at it on the beach, who’d scouted out an empty house to break and enter. Somebody she could chase away. She steadied the bucket against her hip and headed into the trees. It was probably Willis business. She was always dogged with cables and midnight messengers bearing sheaves of documents that had to be signed on the spot. Some lawyer who needed a proxy, or a money man’s courier armed to the teeth. The branches whipped against her naked skin, the cones and needles fallen in the path jabbing her feet as she lurched along. The handle caught on a bush and yanked her off to the side. She ripped it loose and padded on faster.

  She was wild with rage at the brokers and crooks who wouldn’t leave her be, but here she was only whistling in the dark. She knew it could only be one thing: Someone had gotten to Jasper. The lilies high on the hill were rotten with scent. The sea at her back was thick with sharks. She bounded up the white stone steps and reached for the door of the lonely house. She knew it now as sure as she knew her face on the cover of People. Someone had stolen the only man who had as much as she did.

  He stood behind Edna’s vacant chair and rocked on the balls of his feet, ready to sprint at the first sign of either one returning. On the Sony, the special-effects award was being announced by a starlet of the new school—fresh from a million-dollar modeling deal with Clairol and looking like she’d slept her way to the bottom time and again. Her pitch about the wizard technicians who whisked an audience off to other worlds was full of a phony niceness—Disneyland by way of Vegas. The black-tie crowd was moved to minor applause, as a clip from the winning film came on. Greg could only guess, since he hadn’t seen the picture, but it seemed to be the final minute of something like Pompeii. The burghers boiled and shrieked, the prisoners tugged at their chains, and a wave of red-hot tapioca swallowed up the villas in its path.

  It had an instant tonic effect on Greg, who remembered all movie disasters fondly. His hands in his pockets, his shoulders shrugged, he bobbed up and down on his toes. He decided then and there to stay on through to the acting awards. The dread he’d felt an hour ago was gone like any other—vanished the moment he took a step forward. Hollywood didn’t stick like a bitter pill at all, once the matter of self-esteem didn’t hinge on it anymore. The Hollywood Greg had failed in—six years’ peddling scripts, with the growing assurance that all they bought was dogshit—cured him of envying those inside. Watching now as a taciturn animator made his halting thank-yous, clutching the statuette, Greg found himself brimming over with forgive-and-forget. He was so perverse. He was bound to hate himself later—either at ten o�
�clock, when the Oscar show was over, or any minute now, when Sid and Edna reappeared.

  As it happened, he had other things to do.

  He really ought to have seen it coming, except he was such a dope when it came to sudden changes. Always the last to see a thing flash—a falling star, a red-bellied bird in a lemon tree, the plume of smoke when the hills caught fire. He had lousy reflexes. Somehow, he didn’t seem to understand that he’d been in the eye of a storm all day, and the wind had built to a hurricane roar. He watched as an eight-year-old girl handed over an Oscar to a dead old man. A purely honorary matter, as far as Greg could tell, and meant to prove that Hollywood was nothing so much as a happy family. Standing there like a circus couple, the little-doll moppet and the stroke-slowed mogul fairly glowed with good intentions. Rated G. In a minute, no doubt, they’d sing and dance. Greg, who was all but lost by now in the Oscars of the past, gave off a dreamy smile. This bullshit didn’t bother him a bit. He rather liked it.

  I must be in love, he thought with a sudden queer and giddy twist. The word he never used was out before he had a chance to bite his tongue.

  And at that, the screen in front of him went blank. For a moment he thought he’d shorted a circuit deep in his head. He glanced around the room to see if the lights had dimmed as well, and when he looked back a second later, the anchorman on Channel 4 was already going full throttle. At first he hardly took it in. It all blew up so fast.

  “Steepside,” intoned the anchorman, “the Stone Canyon mansion of Jasper Cokes, was the scene of a double suicide tonight.” It was all the man could do to contain himself; this thing was better than a plane crash. “Cokes and a young male friend were discovered about an hour ago in the garden of the vast hilltop estate. They were floating naked in a redwood tub. Both had apparently slit their wrists and bled to death. Police on the scene have found a suicide note, said to be in Cokes’s handwriting. Full text of that note has not been made available, but sources say that Cokes believed he had no other choice.”

  Greg knew right off who the young man was. It was Harry. He stood there face to face with the Sony, bathed in an awful certainty. Ordinarily, he didn’t believe in anything out of this world, supernatural or otherwise. He wasn’t much taken with the notion of fate. So how could he be so sure? They hadn’t said Harry’s name at all. There was some mistake, there had to be. It was just a trick of the airwaves.

  “Cokes’s friend,” the announcer went on, “was an unemployed drifter, identified as Harry Dawes of Hollywood. No one seems to know how long the two men had been lovers. In the note, Cokes is quoted as saying they took this step ‘to be left alone at last.’ That’s a quote.”

  Greg would have bashed in the screen with his bare hands, except he knew he couldn’t stop it. It wasn’t a nightmare a man could wake his way out of.

  “The actor’s widow, Vivien Cokes, sole heir to the Willis land empire, has been out of the country for several weeks. She is now en route to Los Angeles, but the Willis Company will not disclose the time of her arrival. There are no children.” This last delivered like a punch line, as if they’d had the goods on Jasper all along. “NBC will present a special report at eleven-thirty on the life of this strange and tortured star. A man who earned two million dollars every time he went before a camera.”

  He clawed his way up for air and thought: Somebody’s got to be lying.

  As if anyone cared what he thought. The station flipped its inner beams and brought the Oscars on again. Greg swung around to leave. He couldn’t bear the vast indifference of the normal course of things. He stumbled back to the dining room as if he could start all over—as if to see what he had left.

  But just then, Edna came through the gated arch the other way. She was reeling under the weight of a tray piled high with the night’s provisions. The two locked eyes for a long moment. She saw that he’d sneaked a look at the Sony. He waved one hand in the air like a white flag, a shot of panic quivering over his face, and backed away in terror. She might have gone forward to hold him if it hadn’t been for the tray. But all she could do was make a joke.

  “I should have suspected as much,” she said. “You’re mad for short subjects, aren’t you? Just like my sister Ruth. She always said there’s nothing like a nice little travelogue.”

  She advanced all the way to the television and slid the tray across the top. Greg knew he had to get out. This horror was all he had. If he stayed to tell it to Edna, it would end in grief and bitter rage, the same as every other failure he’d been through. He needed to cling to this hairline flaw that he alone detected. Something very specific that didn’t make any sense. If he didn’t go off and nurse it now, he’d lose it.

  “I have to run,” he said quietly, not looking her in the eye.

  “Oh, good,” a voice behind him said. “You decided to join us, did you?” Sid stood square at the front door, cradling a dollar quart of sour-mash. So Greg was caught between them. Even then he didn’t clutch. The spring in his feet still held. He just had to wait for an opening. Meanwhile, Sid went on as always, a ready opinion for every occasion. “You might as well see for yourself,” he said, “the crap they’re giving prizes to. Believe me, you can write circles around them.”

  “Who asked you?” demanded Edna. “You never read a word Greg wrote. He’d write if he could, but he can’t.” She pointed a finger at the accused. “See how upset it’s made him?”

  In fact, he’d started to cry. Quite noiselessly, but the tears were there. And Sid and Edna thought he was having a bit of a crack-up, to do with his lost self-confidence. They were both convinced he could write his own ticket, if only he’d put his mind to it. He usually had to holler to make them stop. He didn’t want to be believed in. The least encouragement set him to pout. And yet, as he stood between them choked with death, they seemed pretty harmless beside the violence sweeping down the canyons. He saw the sort of grief they’d pegged him with—the melancholy writer making scenes on Oscar night.

  “Let’s eat,” said Sid, striding away from the doorway. He didn’t need to be told things twice. What they needed to do was take the pressure off Greg. They all had days when they woke up watery. They just had to redistribute the weight.

  Greg turned and went for the door, and they didn’t protest or try to help. When he turned to close it behind him, he gave them one last look—opening both his hands like a man out of money, and shrugging his shoulders deep. His jaw dropped, his mouth made an O, but nothing at all came out. He couldn’t put it in words. And Sid and Edna looked back at him without any expectations. They’d only stayed friends so long, these three, by taking nothing personal. He owed no logic and no explanations.

  So he pulled the door shut and lurched across the hall to the waiting elevator. He thumbed the 2 button instead of the 1, though without any clear idea of where he was going. He thought he wanted to storm about in the empty streets of Hollywood. He pressed his forehead against the thick cool glass of the bottle-green door, and watched the seedy hallways come and go as he floated down. The wall reliefs of the pharaohs were pocked and crayoned, slapped at random with out-of-date notices. He heard no sign of life at all. This late at night, he usually caught the fragment of a drama, spilling out somebody’s door.

  It wasn’t that he clung to the notion that Harry was some kind of virgin. Nobody went as far as that. But he hadn’t been anyone’s lover either. He was much too clumsy naked, much too shy. He’d probably had a little action here and there, but it must have made him sad. He seemed afraid that love did not come into it at all. Deathless love was Harry’s game. Assuming Jasper Cokes was Harry’s type, even assuming they’d had this wild affair, the kid would never have slit his wrists. With his gypsy eyes and his swimmer’s build, he would have opted for running away if it got too hot. There wasn’t a trace of Satanic abandon about him. He didn’t act out these little plays.

  The glass door released with a sound like a kiss and glided back. Greg stepped out onto 2, where he’d never set foot befor
e. Directly across was apartment J, and he started counting down—moving from west to east, on around to the southeast corner. Behind each door was a television tuned to the Oscars. When he got to C, he didn’t stop to rattle the knob, but hurled his shoulder against the door. Though the crash could have probably roused the cop at Hollywood and Whitley, the lock held firm. So he drew back without a pause, executed a kind of karate leap, and hit the door with the heel of one shoe, just inches above the knob. With a splintering sound, the door blew open and slammed against the wall.

  He reached in and flipped on the light switch just inside, peering about to get his bearings before he stepped over the doorsill. He had no fear of ambush. The ruckus he’d made was his ace in the hole. Silence was a good deal more suspect here at the Cherokee Nile than noise. Banging along the halls, the tenants all went out of their way to announce themselves—on the theory that if they didn’t, who the hell ever would? Besides, they were all as busy as Sid and Edna tonight. And as to fear, the business of getting from 11D down here to Harry’s place had razor-sharped his anger and put aside his tears. If things were as fishy as he believed, he was up against very big money and had to work fast. He owed Harry better than a good cry.

  All the same, the particular smell of a single man hit him hard as he came inside. It was ordinary stuff—gym gear and old books and lemon-lime cologne—that pinned down the kind of man Harry was. Like a hiker, even here in the desert city. A man not easily housed. He was taking a walk around the world, so everything he needed had to fit on his back. Greg swallowed a sob and wiped at both eyes. He padded across to the sink to get water, and let the cold run till it chilled. He bent and drank. The small view of life was right: No man could be free and safe at the same time. One’s innocence played no part. Nor did being twenty-four. From where Greg stood in his furnished room, Harry Dawes had passed this way like a boy on a raft, so unencumbered was the place. And yet, for all of that, it turned out he was doomed.