With the slow grace that accompanies ceremony, Paul reached and plucked the basket away. It was a magic trick. Lisa’s severed head was balanced upright on the sand, facing the sea. Magicians can fool you with things like that. He stood easily in front of her and extended his right foot and put his bare sandy toes against her left temple and slowly and gently turned the head so that it faced me. As he did so he spoke a rapid, guttural, unmusical French.
Lisa rolled mad and empty eyes toward me, eyes that looked through me at something on the other edge of the world beyond me and creaked her jaw wide and made a thin, gassy, aspirated scream, gagged for air, and screamed again.
He squatted, turned her head back, slid his palm under the chin to uptilt her face, spoke down at her, the French rapid but gentler, almost tender, chiding her.
A wave slid up and under him, and the edge of foam slapped the lower half of her face. She gagged and coughed. He stroked her dark, soaked hair back from her forehead with a tender and affectionate gesture, patted her cheek, said something else to her which ended with one word I understood. Adieu.
He moved toward me, and as he did so, I saw a bigger wave coming. She seemed to see it, too. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her mouth shut. It slapped against my hip. It washed completely over her head and reached six feet behind her and paused, then came sluicing back, leaving two small divergent ridges in the sand from the nape of her neck toward the sea, shaped like the wake of a boat. The sea had combed her hair forward, left it pasted down over her face.
He lifted me easily onto my feet, turned me to face up the slope of sand, urging me on. By dint of great mental effort I put three words together. “She can’t see.” Meaning, if she can’t see, she can’t see the wave coming the next time.
“Never mind,” he said. His English was good, but there was a trace of the French-Canadian accent which Lisa had eliminated entirely. As we walked up the beach, I saw the old boat and remembered the day with Lisa. So she had guided Paul to this secluded spot. I saw the spade with the short handle stuck into the dry sand near the trees. Easy to dig a hole big enough for Lisa. With her knees against her chest, her ankles tied to her wrists, it wouldn’t take much of a hole at all. I saw the Moke beyond the trees, on that rough little sand road, parked almost where I had parked it on that day of the lighthouse.
He helped me through the thick, dry sand and eased me down in the shade with my back against a rough tree trunk. “Dig her out?” I said. I was getting pretty good with three-word sentences.
He sat on his heels, began picking up handfuls of dry sand and letting it trickle out of the bottom of his fist. “It’s too late. Not that it would make any difference. I shouldn’t have used the basket. She hated the basket. She begged me not to use the basket. But I had to be sure she told every last thing. But something broke in her head. After she lost all her English. Something gave way. I thought seeing you might put her back together. I guess it was the basket. I’ll be more careful with you.”
I looked out at Lisa. I saw the biggest wave yet of the incoming tide. It did not curl and smash down at the packed sand until it reached her; then it bounced high off that dark roundness sparkling in the sun, the way a wave will bounce off a small boulder along the shore.
It was hard to believe it was Lisa. From the back only the dark hair showed. Her head looked like some large nut covered with a dark growth that had fallen from a tropical tree and rolled down, coming to rest in the incoming tide.
“If she holds her breath at the right time, she could last a long time, perhaps,” he said. “But she is dead. Just as you are dead.”
“And … Mary?”
There was a slight Gallic shrug. “That was bad luck. I went to her to try to convince her to leave Harry for good. Why should a woman like that have been loyal to a man like that? I wanted her to run, because without her, Harry would have to find three hundred thousand somewhere else. I have that much. I was going to squeeze Harry for half his stock. Waterbury should have let me buy in. Then nothing would have ever happened.”
“Bad luck?”
“She tried to run. The house was dark. I caught her, and we fell badly. Very badly. It was an ugly situation. She knew who I was. I couldn’t call an ambulance, could I? She knew how bad it was. I had to find out a lot from her while she could still talk. She was stubborn. I had to … amplify the pain to make her speak.” He frowned. “I thought it would sicken me to do that. But it was a strange pleasure in a little while. As if we were lovers. So that is bad luck too, I suppose, to learn that about oneself. Gratification is expensive and very dangerous, eh?”
He stood up, clapped his hands to remove the loose sand. “And it was the same pleasure with Lisa, and we will discover if it is the same with a man, too. I should not care to dig a hole big enough for you, Mr. McGee.”
“McGee?”
“I am very good about details. Harry described you well enough. Mary is dead. Lisa is dead. McGee is dead. But we must find out who you sent the letter to and what it said. We shall improvise, eh? There is a tire pump and a jack in the tool compartment of that ugly little vehicle. Something will come to mind. There will be enough time to proceed slowly and carefully.”
He walked up toward the car, a hundred feet away. The equation was very simple. No unknowns. I could spend the afternoon on this hideaway beach as Paul Dissat whiled away the lazy hours with a question-and-answer game with the penalty for wrong answers and right answers precisely the same. Improvised agony.
Or I could try to stand up. That was the first step. If I couldn’t, there wasn’t any point in wondering about step two. If I could stand up, then I had to see if I could walk down the beach and into the sea. I had to hurry, but with short steps well within the range of my constraining nylon cord, and I had to keep my balance. The third part of it was getting into the water at just the right place. I had seen the place when I had been out there near Lisa’s head in the hot sun.
There is no such thing as an undertow. Not anywhere in the world. All you ever find is a rip. To have a rip, you have to have a partial barrier parallel to the beach. It can be a sandbar or a reef. The barrier has to be underwater. There has to be a hole or channel through it. A great volume of water comes in on wind and waves and tide over the barrier, rushing toward the beach with waves marching right along behind each other, hurrying in. Then that big volume of water has to get out to make room for the water coming in. So it goes flowing out through the hole or channel. A big volume and a narrow deep hole makes one hell of an outgoing current. It is sort of fan-shaped, wide at the beach end, narrowing toward the gap in the barrier, and going faster and stronger as it gets narrower.
You can read a rip on a sandy beach from the way it boils up the sand in a limited area and makes a foam line out toward the gap. If you get caught in one, you swim parallel to the beach until you are out of it, then turn toward the beach. Fight it and you can panic and drown, because they usually go faster than any man can swim.
I got up, scraping some hide off my back on the palm trunk. I went down the beach slope, stamping my feet wide for balance. The beach and the sea kept tilting, misting, merging, flowing. In nightmare slowness I passed the round, black, hairy thing, saw it vividly for just a moment. A wave had come in and covered it entirely. The top of it was a few inches under momentarily motionless water, at rest when a wave had come all the way in and gathered itself to run back out. Her black hair was fanned out, and in that instant of sharpened, memorable vision I saw the spume of sand drifting out of her open mouth, like a strange cartoon balloon, a message without sound. A sandy, tan farewell.
Paul was shouting above the wave noises. I was off balance, leaning forward. A wave slapped my chest and straightened me up. I took a deep breath and lunged forward. I counted on the exceptional buoyancy of the water, the high salinity of the dry season. I had to know if I was in the rip. I managed to roll and float and look back at the beach and saw him and the trees and the raft and the Moke moving into the dist
ance at six or eight miles an hour. It was a good rip, and I hoped it was a long gap in a barrier reef, that the reef was well offshore, and that it would move me out into a current that would take me away from there. Any direction at all. Out to sea and drown while laughing at how Lennie Sibelius was going to nail Paul Dissat, nail him and sweat him and find out how it happened. All of it.
The swell had built nicely, and it was going to play hell on him, trying to find me bobbing around in all that blue and white sparkle. If the hands are dead, it is less burdensome to drown, but you try not to drown if you can help it. I could arch my back and float high, my ears full of the drum sounds of the sea, a wave slapping me in the face now and then. Lift my head, pick a direction, and go kicking along. When all the luck has gone bad, do what you can.
Nineteen
It was a good rip that carried me way out and put me into a sea current that seemed to be taking me due north at a hell of a pace, increasing speed the further out I got. The water was warm, and the sky was squinty bright, and I was gently lifted and dropped in the swell. It had been a good way to live, and given a choice of dying, it was as good as any that came to mind. I wanted to stay aware of the act of dying as long as I could. I wanted to touch it and taste it and feel it. When it is the last sensation left, there is a hunger to use all of it up, just to see what it is like at the very end, if it is peace or panic.
I kicked my bound legs slowly and easily. When I lifted up, I could no longer pick out the beach area where Lisa had died. I looked to the southwest and saw the checkerboard pattern of the town of St. George’s to the northeast growing more easterly as I floated farther. Finally, I began to see more and more of Grand Anse beach as I drifted further out from shore, and it came into view beyond Long Point. When all of the beach was visible, I estimated that I was two miles from land. I saw the bright sails moving back and forth in the bay when a wave lifted me high. I could not guess how long I had been floating because I kept fading into a semidazed condition very much like sleep. The sun was so high I guess it was past noon.
There was a change in the direction of the current. I believed it had begun to carry me northwesterly, but I was too far from any reference points to be sure. I was opposite the town by then, and as near as I could estimate, I was just as far from the town as I was from Point Saline. When I could no longer see much of the town, see only the green mounded hills, I knew I was at least three miles offshore, possibly four.
I came out of a daze and saw a tall ship bearing down on me about a mile away. There was just enough angle so I could make her out as a three-masted schooner, and she had all the canvas on her, all the fore and aft sails flying, tilting her on a long reach.
I knew it could be reality or fantasy, and the smart money would bet on fantasy. I guessed she had come out of St. George’s, and from my estimate of the wind, if she was headed north to the Grenadines, she would stay on that course until she was far enough out to come about and put her on the opposite tack for a single long run that would clear all of Grenada and head her for Carriacou.
I felt remote, as if working out a problem that had nothing to do with me. My arms had no feeling. I moved up and down on big, slow, blue swells. The crests were not breaking. I kept kicking myself back to an angle where I could watch her, see the boil of white water at her bows. My chance of being seen was one in ten thousand, even if she passed by me fifty yards away.
But then I had an idea. I suppressed it because it was going to involve a lot of effort and any effort did not really seem worthwhile. There would be fishermen aboard, people who always scanned the sea even when there is no hope of stopping for a chance at whatever quarry they see. The big fish smash the water, whack it to foam, send the spray flying. Go to work. Make a fuss. Give them something to spot. Hard to do. Double up and snap. Get the bound legs up and whack them down. Get into a spin, writhing and turning the body, kicking. Duck under and come out and kick as high as you can. Dizziness then. Sickness. Vision going. A sound of sails slatting, lines creaking, a thin cry. Sound of an outboard nearby. Hands grasping, lifting me. Fall onto hardness, onto oil stink, fish smell, and vomit up quarts and quarts of sea water …
Then came that burlesque of fantasy, an ironic parody of the seafarer’s paradise. I was on a low, broad hatch cover, and I could feel the motion of a ship under me. I squinted up into brightness to see, clustered close around me—all their lovely faces somber, all their girl voices murmuring of concern—the sirens of all the legends, seawind stirring their tresses, their lovely skin in shades from antique ivory to oiled walnut. They were close around me, a multitude of them, prodding and massaging calves, ankles, and puffy feet—forearms, wrists, and swollen hands.
One lifted my dead left hand, and I stared at it with remote interest. It was a dark purple rubber glove, over-inflated, with deep dimples where the knuckles had been.
Suddenly I screamed. It astonished me. I am not the screaming type. There was a pain in my right hand equivalent to having all the fingernails yanked off simultaneously. Pain shoved me far enough into sudden darkness so that the raw scream seemed far away and I could think of it as an angry white bird, clawing and flapping its way out of my open throat.
I came out of blackness in time to get myself braced for the next pain. It was again in the right hand, and as it faded, I got a big one in the left hand, which caught me off-balance and so I roared. The enchantresses moved back a little, looking down at me in worried speculation. They were all in little sleeveless blouses in bright colors, no two alike, all in little white shorts.
Captain Mickey Laneer came into view and perched a haunch on the hatch cover beside my hip. She wore a khaki shirt and a baseball cap. “What the hell have you been trying to do to yourself, McGee?”
“Hello, Mick. Lost an argument.”
“Somebody throw you overboard?”
“Ran away, got into a rip, floated out from shore.”
She stared at me. “From shore? Jesus! You could be a little bit hard to kill. Gals, this is an old and good friend of our old and dear friend, Rupert Darby, captain of the Dulcinea. Say hello to Travis McGee.” They said hello in smiling musical chorus.
“McGee, clockwise around you, starting with Julia in the yellow shirt, meet Teddie, Louise, Hester, Janey, Joyce, Margot, and Valerie. Teddie, get to the helm on the double and tell Mr. Woodleigh he’s falling off to port, for chrissake, and bring him back on. Janey, Mr. McGee needs a big mug of black coffee with four ounces of Fernandez rum in it. Margot, you help me get Mr. McGee onto his feet, and we’ll put him in my cabin while we run back in.”
I started to say something to her, then had to clamp down on the pains. Very savage pain but not as bad as the first ones.
“Speak to you privately, Mickey?”
“Move back, gals.”
“Somebody is going to make very damned sure I drowned. It could revise their plans if I didn’t. They’ll keep a watch on the hospital. They could get to me there, I think. It’s a bad risk.”
“McGee, I like you. But I can’t get involved in anything. The government pretends I don’t exist. They like the money I bring in. The black power types talk about me forcing blacks into prostitution. Bullshit! Hester is the only almost pure black, and there are three less than half. Every girl has freedom of choice, believe me. Any publicity of any kind, any infraction, they hit me with a heavy fine. Enough to hurt without driving me out of business. Don’t kill the goose. But don’t let her get fat. You need hospital attention for the head and the hands. So I’m going to come about and have a nice run back and turn you over to Rupe to put you in the hospital. I’ve got four good, regular customers aboard who’ve paid their money for a ten-day cruise. Sorry.”
I started to fade out and couldn’t have pulled myself back in time if a sudden pain hadn’t hit my right foot, as if an electric icicle were being shoved through it.
“Mick. I’m … sorry, too. Rupe heading up to Dominica Wednesday. Take me up to Grenadines, set up a meet, transfe
r me. Reach him on radio?”
“Yes but, dammit—”
“Take me back, and I blow your tired businessman cruises right out of the water, captain. Sorry as hell. You probably fulfill a pressing need. No pun. Official complaint to your lady governor, if I have to. And the premier. And the Miami Herald.”
“McGee, I like you less and less. You are a bastard!”
“Only when I have to be.”
“But, damn you, you could die on me!”
“Sort of a risk for both of us.”
“Valerie? VAL! Get it on over here, girl. This big ugly son of a bitch going to die on me? She was a nurse, McGee.”
Valerie was of that distinctive and very special mix you see in Honduras. Mayan, Chinese, and Spanish. She looked at my hands and she had me roll onto my belly while she checked the back of my head. Her touch was firm enough to hurt but gentle enough to let you know the hurt was necessary.
They helped me onto my back again, and she bent close and thumbed my eyelids up and looked gravely into one eye and then the other, back and forth, several times.
“Well?” Mickey said impatiently.
“Eet wass a terrible blow on the head. I don’t know. The pupils are just the same size. Probably no fracture because the skull is solid and thick right there. Concussion. Could be bleeding in the brain, captain.”
“How do we tell? What do we do?”
“One girl has to be with him every minute, and what she has to do all the time she is with him is count his pulse for one full minute and write it down. Count his respiration for one full minute. Write it down. Over and over. One hour is the most a girl can do that and be accurate. Half-hour is better.”
“So we set up half-hour shifts.”
A Tan and Sandy Silence Page 19
