by John Gardner
“Jesus,” Mr. Nit said, and glanced back at where the Captain would emerge if he emerged. But he could see the thing floating, sweeping out to sea, and, in his confusion, he threw a line to it. The Coast Guard cutter was turning, coming back. “Jesus,” he said again. The Indomitable was loaded to the gunnels with marijuana.
“Switch off the lights,” Mr. Goodman said.
“Switch off the lights,” Mr. Nit called. The lights went off. The cutter crossed to starboard, the wrong side. Mr. Goodman had his shoes off now. He snapped back the rope and dived. He thrashed in the water, blind as one of Mr. Nit’s eels, and in three, four minutes, absurdly, he found the body. It was certainly dead, but he clutched it by the hair and yelled, “Pull the rope!”
Mr. Nit was already pulling, though in the cacophony of foghorns and shouts from the bridge he heard nothing. Mr. Goodman, with the corpse, came up to the hull and understood that Mr. Nit could not pull them both up—could hardly have pulled up one of them alone, since Mr. Nit was a tiny man, fragile and quick as a monkey but no more substantial. Mr. Goodman looped the rope around the drowned man’s waist, then shinnied. When he reached the rail he dug in and hauled. The drowned man came over the side; still no sign of the Captain.
“Jesus,” Mr. Nit said.
Mr. Goodman lay down on the deck, panting like a whale.
“Jesus,” Mr. Nit said, “what do we do with him now?”
“He’s a human being,” Mr. Goodman gasped. “We couldn’t just let him die.”
The Coast Guard cutter had passed and was circling back.
“Terrific,” said Mr. Nit. “Human being. Terrific.”
He did not look like one, it was true. His suit, striped shirt and tie were unsightly, and his shoes had come off. His hair hung over his face like seaweed, and whenever you moved him or pushed down on his stomach—neither Mr. Goodman nor Mr. Nit had had lessons in artificial respiration, though they were doing their best—water came out of him like juice from an overripe pumpkin. He looked like one of those pictures called Descent from the Cross (Mr. Goodman had once been a museum guard).
“Is he breathing yet?” Mr. Nit asked anxiously of Mr. Goodman’s ear.
Mr. Goodman pushed hard on the stomach again. “Not that I can see.”
Mr. Nit leaned still closer. “That cutter’s coming right up our asshole, Jack.”
Mr. Goodman sighed, pushed up from the body, hunching his shoulders in the cold wet salt-smelly shirt, and seized the drowned man’s feet. “We better get him out of sight,” he said. “Grab hold.”
Mr. Nit grabbed hold and they rolled him into the fish hatch with the pot. “Now let’s get out of here,” said Mr. Goodman.
The cutter horn boomed and Mr. Nit jumped like a rabbit. “Yes sir,” he said, as if the horn had spoken English, and he yelled, “Full speed frontwards!”
The Indomitable churned up white water a moment, then moved. The cutter’s searchlight came over them like the eye of God—the cutter looked a mile long—and a man on the cutter yelled down at them through a bullhorn. Rowrrrowrrow!
“Yes sir!” Mr. Nit yelled, cupping his hands. “Yes sir! Sorry sir!”
“Get the lights back on,” said Mr. Goodman.
“Lights!” yelled Mr. Nit.
They came on.
The bullhorn growled again, something about a drowning man. Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman cupped their hands and yelled: “No sign of him. We been looking.” The Indomitable was now running full speed ahead, bobbing up and down in the sea’s heavy waves like a fisherman’s cork; the cutter was standing still, the white eye of God staring after them as if baffled and slightly hurt. Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman continued yelling until fog blanked out even the searchlight.
And now, riding easy in the quiet of the bay, bobbing more gently, the engine no longer groaning in spasms as it did in the waves of the open Pacific, the Indomitable slowed and Mr. Goodman struggled to figure out his bearings. He made out at last the on-off-on flashing of the beer sign.
“Christ,” said Mr. Nit, “what’d we have done if the Captain come up, back there?”
They both turned at once. The Captain came out in his old black coat and his old black hat, his face greenish white from his sea-sickness. He steadied himself on the rail and inched toward them. He was barefoot, like the drowned man, and the crotch of his pants hung low. He was whiskered and bruised like one of those bums on Third Street. He had long white hair.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Drowned man, sir,” Mr. Goodman said. “We pulled him aboard.”
The old man’s eyes widened and his lips sucked in and he decided not to believe it.
“It’s true, sir,” Mr. Nit said. “He was a human being, sir.”
Captain Fist leaned over the rail and vomited. Then, turning as slowly as a ship, he went back to his cabin and to bed.
Half an hour later, after they’d docked, Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman dragged the body from the fish hatch, scraped off the marijuana, and, failing to notice that it was breathing already, though fast asleep and possibly unconscious, tried to revive it. Jane came from the wheel to help, slipping off her glasses as she came. She was pretty, but rugged as a saw. “Jesus Christ,” she said, and pushed them away. She pulled the drowned man’s tongue out and sat down on his belly. About a spoonful of water came dribbling from his mouth. She pumped on his belly with her buttocks and moved his elbows up and down like wings. “It’s useless,” she said. “He’s been like this for an hour by now.” Nevertheless, she went on pumping. Mr. Nit and Mr. Goodman squatted beside her, watching, and after a long time the drowned man groaned. She put her mouth over his.
When Peter Wagner opened his eyes it was the story of his life. By habit, he closed his arms around her and returned the kiss. She seemed surprised, and struggled. He humped upward a little and her pelvis moved down to meet his. He remembered the bridge then, and his eyes came wide open. Beyond the girl he could make out two men, hunched down, one broad-chested and sad of face, with arms like a boxer’s, a mouth oddly meek, the other small as a boy, with an axe-shaped head and the eyes of a coyote. In the greenish-yellow light behind them stood a man with an old black overcoat reaching to his shoetops and, on his shaggy, snow-white head, a wide-brimmed hat. His heavily knuckled hand leaned hard on a cane. Peter Wagner pulled his mouth away and the girl straightened up.
“Well,” she said, “he’s alive,” and she swung up off him and put on her glasses.
It was the wrong thing to say. He jerked up, groping with his hands and feet, and made for the rail. Without expression, the old man brought up his cane and then brought it down. It felt like being clubbed by a baseball bat. He saw stars; then he saw nothing.
~ ~ ~
2
ALKAHEST’S CONVERSION
John F. Alkahest, sitting in his wheelchair
The old woman lowered the book to her lap, wondering, half-unconsciously, whether or not she was in a mood to continue. She was finding the story at least mildly interesting—certain little oddities of attitude and style awakened in her mind brief flickers of satisfaction. But even for an old woman imprisoned in her bedroom by a lunatic, there was no denying it was a waste of time, and since she knew in advance that there were pages fallen out—for all she knew, whole chapters might be lost—it was a more or less serious question. Yet it was not exactly in those terms that she framed it.
“That’s what we’re down to,” she said half aloud, as if to someone in the room. She was thinking how, when Horace was alive, they’d sometimes gone down to New York City to some play by William Shakespeare. She remembered the city lights, the crowded sidewalks, the sudden excitement of entering the theater, stepping abruptly into a whole new world—new qualities of sound, red seas of carpet, red, velvet-covered chains on brass posts, the people all dressed in their finest. She thought of that moment, just after the lights dimmed, when the outer curtain rose, lifting like the skirt of a curtsying grand lady, and then the second swept away, and there st
ood the set, unreal, magnificent, a lure to an even more magical kingdom where unreal creatures in spangled, bright clothes walked their stylized walks, making stylized gestures, faces brightly painted like the faces of dolls, intoning in a language never spoken by men,
Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days …
Sometimes, in the years since Horace’s death, she’d gone down to the city with her friend Estelle, and though it wasn’t quite the same, it was thrilling nonetheless, that magical step into a world all sharp color and high sentiment. How paltry these modern novels were, compared to that!
And yet it was not merely the excitement of the stage. What could be more humble—more ridiculous, even—than her friend the village librarian, Ruth Thomas, sitting on a milkstool behind her husband’s cows, reading to him and to his hired men stories out of Edgar Allan Poe or Wilkie Collins? Sally had not heard it, actually, had only heard Ed Thomas speak of it, and sometimes Ruth; yet she had no doubt that the excitement was nearly the same. As he moved like a thoughtful bear from cow to cow (Ruth loved speaking of her husband as a bear, mimicking him as she did so, looking far more like a bear than he did, since she was large and lumbering), Ruth would read expressively, casting her voice above the milking-machine noise, and if he missed something Ed would call, “What? What?” and she would read the line again. So Horace, long ago, had frequently read to Sally Abbott. They had meant something then, works of literature. The world had been younger, feelings had run deep.
Yet even as she thought it, she doubted that it was true. With sudden vehemence and grief, she thought: Books have no effect at all, no value whatsoever.
Horace had been a voracious reader, as well as a lover of music and art. One might have supposed that it was there he had found his serenity and wisdom—for nothing could ruffle him except, occasionally, her brother. But Richard too, Horace’s nephew and all but son—certainly as dear to them both as a son could have been—Richard too had been a lover of books and good music. Shakespeare and Mozart and the rest had not saved him. With grim purpose, alone in the house where his parents had first lived, he’d drunk himself indifferent and gone up to the attic …
The old woman sighed, her mind flinching back to the commonplace. Where was Ginny?
It was an embarrassment to think of her niece at her Lodge meeting, sitting in a kind of imitation throne, with a satiny, sashlike thing slanting from one shoulder, speaking to her “sisters” in stylized mumbo-jumbo, making stylized gestures, exactly like characters in some tedious play without a story. It was all, in the old woman’s opinion, shamefully low-class, artificial. In her mind’s eye she saw them seated in their get-ups, prim in wooden folding chairs all around the room, the middle of the room left empty so that three or four of them—no doubt Ginny among them—could parade with their Christmasy dark blue and scarlet flags: pudgy, fat-hipped women moving carefully in step, furtively glancing left and right to stay in line, imitation soldiers on the march to God knew what. The very thought sickened her. Yet how much of life came down to that, really—mere dress-up, ridiculous make-believe!
She sighed again, more shallowly this time, her reverie drifting toward a sensitive place. Everyone was guilty, of course. (Now the old woman was safe again, though her expression was sad.) Even Horace, she thought, evading the tedium of life, the plainness and ultimately, hopelessness of it all, playing Swan Lake on his office phonograph while he picked at decaying teeth. Even she, Sally Page Abbott herself, drifting through this novel full of clever, weary talk—
Where have we gone wrong?
That’s what Tolstoy asked himself.
—Tolstoy indeed!
It was covering, all covering, mere bright paint over rotting barn walls. It was perhaps that that her nephew had realized, that night.
She remembered with a pang the annual Bennington Antiques Festival, where she’d first seen Richard with the Flynn girl. One single image came into her mind, and the emotion, dimmed by years but still sharp, that went with it. It was August, the time when all through Vermont every village had its fair, in those days, its battery of church suppers, its evening band concerts and firemen’s demonstrations. It was a time of almost daily celebration of high summer and the beginnings of the harvest, one last communal fling before September, when the harvest came in earnest—apples, corn, pumpkins—and with it increasing signs of autumn, and then locking time, and then winter. She and Horace, that year, had taken Richard and Ginny—he was seventeen, Ginny perhaps ten, both of them golden-haired as angels and both full of life, always laughing and romping. The children had gone through the rooms of exhibits and the temporary shops with only casual interest, even Richard too young to understand the importance and beauty of old tables and lamps, wooden plows, old paintings that represented actual scenes of Vermont life seventy years ago; and while she and Horace lingered over hand-painted dishes and Bennington pottery, Ginny and Richard had gone on out to the lawn where there were games in progress and where, unbeknownst to Sally Abbott, the Flynn girl stood watching, heart fluttering, for Richard. When she and Horace emerged, arms loaded with packages—and this was the image that remained in Sally’s mind—Richard and the Flynn girl were on the bright green slope that dropped gently toward the brook, holding hands and swinging each other around and around in a kind of wild primeval dance. She had on a white dress, and her red hair was flying. Behind them stood pines and the dark greenish blue of Mount Anthony. Ginny looked up as she and Horace came out, her expression slightly furtive, knowing. “Richard’s in love,” she said. Her smile was proud, proprietary, as if perhaps she herself had arranged it.
They stood still, looking; and after a moment Horace said, “With the Flynn girl?” He spoke as if bemused.
They’d been surprised to discover, the next instant, how fully little Ginny understood the implications. “Daddy doesn’t know,” she said.
“Would he mind?” Horace asked—disingenuous.
“She’s Irish,” Ginny said, and smiled again.
Horace had showed nothing. Sally had looked thoughtfully at her niece, not quite sure what her own feelings were, though part of what she felt was, of course, distress. To Ginny, clearly, it was all just delightful; and Sally had mused, half-unconsciously: how easily nature overwhelms stiff opinions, dead theories. Horace said, his nearly bald head tipped, his suitcoat bunched up from when he’d lifted the armful of packages, his mild eyes gazing past his load at the pair on the slope: “Well, well! Irish, you say!”
They’d stopped whirling now and stood laughing, still holding hands. Then Richard looked up and saw them and waved. After a moment the Flynn girl waved too. It took courage, knowing Richard, but he came up toward them, leading her, still holding her hand. He introduced her, stumbling on her queer old Gaelic name and blushing. She too blushed, so that the freckles were hidden for a moment, eclipsed. Horace bowed formally, exactly as he would if he were meeting a new patient, someone he wished to assure of his care and respect. He was shorter than the girl. Her beauty made him seem a mere dandy.
When they were in the car, later, starting for home, Richard watched, trying not to make it too obvious, until the bright orange hair and white dress were out of sight behind the trees.
Then Ginny said, looking up at Sally, “Isn’t she pretty?”
“She’s beautiful,” Sally said. She studied Richard’s face, smiling to herself. She added, “Don’t you think so, Horace?”
He seemed lost in thought, his soft hands closed firmly on the steering wheel, his head still drawn back and tilted. She knew pretty well what was going through his mind. It wasn’t good to intrude in another man’s family affairs; but also young people had a right to fall in love as they pleased. It was the most obvious of all lessons of history. “A very nice girl, I thought,” he said.
It was true, they’d learned as they later came to know her. She was a joy and a delight, gentle and quick-witted, passionate, full of fun—though she also had a te
mper, and when she chose to, she knew how to sulk. They had valued her none the less for it. If she dared to contend with James L. Page, she’d need all her weaponry. Little by little Sally and Horace Abbott had become implicated in the lovers’ schemes. Sally, for one, hadn’t minded. She would do it again.
She looked down at the book, staring through it, still gazing at that elegant dance on the lawn, the Flynn girl’s red hair flying. No, not a dance, she corrected herself, feeling sudden irritation: the natural exuberance of young people in love.
But it was also a dance. An artifice. An illusion. She half closed her eyes, studying the image more critically, watching the stylized gestures, listening to the voices.
It was a curious reverie, Sally Abbott realized, awakening with a start. It was as vivid in her mind as the pictures that rose when she was reading the book—and probably not much more true to life. But what was strangest about it, she realized now that she’d noticed what she’d been thinking—what sadness she’d been savoring—was that the thought, the whole mood, was so unlike her. She’d always been an optimist, a person who enjoyed life. She was never one to brood: she cleaned house, cooked meals, took hold of things firmly and did her best with them. Why these doubts of the obvious, this ugly cynicism? It was an effect of the novel, she had to suppose. An unhealthy effect, no question about it!
No question about it, she thought again, but her fingers were trembling. Sally Page Abbott had been a handsome woman once, well married and well off, wonderfully proud of her nephew and niece, though sorry, of course, to have no children of her own. When she looked around her now … She glanced away from the page, then back, snatching a little breath.
She was staring at the print, and it came clear to her that she did intend to go on reading, merely to pass the time—merely to escape the stupidity, the dreariness, the waste of things. Never mind how foolish the book might be, how artificial. Her niece’s meetings were right, in the end. Mumbo-jumbo; flags. By all means, throw up a screen! Sing hymns! Speak verse!
