by Howard Fast
“Anyway,” I said, “we don’t want to attract any attention. The motor makes enough noise as it is. If I open it up, it’ll sound like a plane.”
“You know this river?”
“I know it well enough to get out onto the Meadows,” I said.
The three of us remained silent then as we moved down the river to the Meadows. I sat on one side of the stern seat, my hand on the throbbing control lever, and Alice on the other side. She put her hand on mine once, so that they pressed together. I could not say how grateful I was for this gesture of partial forgiveness, and I said nothing. Shlakmann sat in front of the boat, a grotesquely large and shapeless hulk. I was glad that the darkness dulled his features; I didn’t enjoy looking at him.
The bridges had a movement of their own as we passed under them. Some of them rumbled with auto traffic. Once a train roared overhead, an endless line of dark, empty, clacking freight cars. Once someone shouted at us.
But mostly, we moved in a world of our own, a world separated from the swarming cluster of houses, people and shops and roads that constituted the area of the land. They were away from us and blocked from us by the curious reverse of modern civilization that is a riverbank.
Even by day, an off-track river such as the Hackensack is a separate and special place. By night, it is its own world, and as the moon rose, changing from orange to silver-blue, the river became even more remote from the world. At first the moon lit the factories on the west bank of the river, but as we slid down to the Meadows, its silver light touched the water and thinned the darkness with a ghostly illumination. We slid out of the river into the northern edge of the Meadows, and Shlakmann said:
“Camber—you know Berry’s Creek Canal?”
We were now in a bay of sorts, large enough in the daytime and giving the impression of a vast body of water now in the moonlight, rimmed by banks of tall dry reeds, which stretched away endlessly and remotely to the west, and eastward made a barrier between us and the Jersey Turnpike. There, in the distance, we could see the lights of the cars that raced along the great highway, and beyond that, in the further distance over the bridge, the needle of light that was the tower of the Empire State Building.
“I think I could find Berry’s Creek—in the daytime,” I added.
“Don’t give me daytime.”
“I’ll try to find it—my God, don’t you think I’ll try to find it?”
“How far would Berry’s Creek be from here?”
“I’m not sure.” I picked up the first buoy marker, and I drew Shlakmann’s attention to it. “There’s the marker. The river runs through the Meadows, but it has no banks. If the tide were out, it would be easier, but the tide’s in now, and there’s no way to know what’s river and what’s meadow. If we can keep to the channel, I would guess that we’re no more than three or three and a half miles from Berry’s Creek. We go through this bay and there’s a neck out of it, and then another bay. There’s the trouble.”
“We want the Creek Canal.”
“I don’t know about the canal,” I said uneasily.
“Is it to this side of the creek or beyond it?” Alice asked.
“North of the creek, maybe half a mile.”
“I’ll try,” I said. “Is that where the boat’s anchored?”
“If it’s there,” Shlakmann said, “then that’s where it’s anchored.”
I opened the motor a little, and even with the great weight of Shlakmann, the bow lifted and we raced across the water, toward the buoy and past it, the water curling away from the boat and turning into silver, moon-rinsed foam. I steered south and we fled across the surface of the bay.
“This is more like it!” Shlakmann yelled.
I told him that I knew the bay, but that soon I would have to throttle down. “We don’t draw much,” I shouted over the noise of the motor, “but here at night an inch of water looks the same as a foot. I don’t want to hang up on the mud. The tide is turning, and there’s no foothold in this mud. If we got hung up on a mudbar, we could be there for a week before anyone found us. There’s not much traffic here in March.”
“Suppose the police hear us?” Alice asked me.
“Well, what could they do? They’d be off on shore, and they can’t see us in the night. We’re covered by the reeds. If they had any reason to be suspicious, they might call the harbor patrol from Newark Bay, but why should they? They’ll just pass us off as a bunch of kids out for a night ride.”
I had been speaking into her ear, and Shlakmann yelled, “None of that! God-damn you, Camber, no secrets!”
I throttled down the motor. We were close to the southern end of the bay anyway, and I had to search for the buoy that marked the exit channel.
“We haven’t any secrets,” I said.
“Then talk up. Play footsie and I take both of you apart.”
“I’m so tired of that kind of talk,” Alice sighed. “Don’t you have any sense, Mr. Shlakmann?”
“Now listen, sister,” he said, “just who the hell do you think you are?”
“I know who I am and I know who you are, Mr. Shlakmann. I don’t like you any better than you like me, but we’re all in this together. Why don’t you stop threatening us and try to help? Do you think it’s easy to get us through this wilderness at night? My husband is doing the best he can.”
“Yakety-yak!” he yelled. “I tell you, Camber, I going to sew up her lip for good, you don’t shut her up. I tell you that.”
“He’s not very stable,” I whispered out of the side of my mouth. “Please—lay off him, Alice.”
“Speak up!”
“I’m shutting her up. You wanted me to, didn’t you?”
Then I saw the next buoy and pointed to it. “There’s our way—”
We crept down through the Meadows. Once out of the bay, I didn’t dare to open the throttle again. Not only was I unsure of the channel, but I could make no estimate of the actual distance we had come, and thereby no guess as to where Montez’s boat might be anchored. So we crept through the night, from buoy to buoy, my mind and my sight reaching out for the channel until every muscle in my body ached with the tension.
Once we lost it entirely, and I had to circle around and around to pick up a buoy again. It was a maze of marsh grass and twisting waterways, but at least it was delineated, and I could not actually end up in the wrong direction. I had only to stand up in the boat and sight the Empire State tower to find east, and from that, north and south. The river had disappeared entirely, and occasionally the channel was no more than a thirty-foot passage among the reeds, yet I managed to creep from buoy to buoy on my way downstream.
For the first time since my own nightmare had begun, I had the sense of taking positive action and doing it well, of keeping my head and moving toward a desired destination. I became more tense as midnight approached, for I knew that they would be calling the house, and I could not guess what might happen when the telephone was not answered. Would they be in touch with the boat? Would they tell it to hoist anchor and be down-river and out through Newark Bay. As I understood it, Montez took no risks. Once he gave up the hope of the key, he could dispose of Polly and be in the clear, and all the wild and pain-stricken complaints Alice and I might make to the police would be of no avail. We had no proof, and Montez had his diplomatic immunity to wrap around him as a protective sheath.
When Alice pleaded with Shlakmann, “How much further? Where is it?” he pointed to me.
“Our speed is only five or six miles an hour. And we’re not moving in a straight line—not by a long shot.”
“Can’t you hurry?” Alice begged me.
“I can’t hurry,” I replied desperately. “The last thing in the world I should do at this point is to hurry.”
I was searching for a buoy again. I crept through the water, casting from side to side, winding back and forth. Here there was no preferable channel, but rather a series of little rivers through the six-foot high reeds, and I cast from one to the next,
feeling trapped and frustrated, like a man in a maze who keeps turning back on his path until he is wild with anger and disappointment.
It was not simply a matter of proceeding southward with sufficient water under my bottom. If it were only that, it would have been simple, and I could have opened the throttle and been in Newark Bay in less than an hour. But I had to find the main channel—always find it and keep with it. Otherwise, I could slide past the fat man’s boat, with only a screen of reeds separating us—and never know it was there.
The incoming tide had fulfilled itself. For the long moment of equilibrium, it had stood still, the thousands of acres of water that covered the Meadows in suspension, like a vast sheet of moonlit glass. Then it turned and began the ebb. I watched bits of straw and litter begin the southward flow, and I chose a channel that matched the direction. I was fortunate because a buoy loomed out of the darkness, and then I noticed a slight eddy where the even motion of the tide was being interrupted. I cut off the motor.
“What’s that for?” Shlakmann demanded, his guttural voice echoing through the night.
“Quiet,” I whispered, pointing to the eddy.
“Johnny, what is it?”
“There’s nothing here,” Shlakmann said. We were walled in with reeds on either side.
“Maybe not right here,” I told him, “but something’s flowing into the river and interrupting the tide. It’s a current of some kind. Does this canal of yours have a current?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“The boat could be anywhere,” I whispered, “so keep your voice down, Shlakmann. The boat could be twenty yards from us and the reeds would hide it.”
“Please, Mr. Shlakmann,” Alice joined in gently. “Johnny knows the Meadows.”
“All right,” he whispered hoarsely. “How do we find it?”
I unshipped the oars and handed him one. “Use it as a paddle—from where you are. I’ll paddle and steer from the back.”
We moved slowly down the channel, and suddenly a side-passage opened. The eddy came from there. We slid into it, and it broadened into a forty-foot passageway among the reeds, leading due west. About eighty or ninety yards ahead of us, anchored in midstream and showing as a dark blur in the moonlight, lay a big cabin cruiser.
“Is that it?” I whispered to Shlakmann.
“It could be.”
“No way to know?”
“Maybe, if we come up closer. It looks about the right size.
“Who would be on it, Shlakmann?” I whispered.
He knelt in the bottom of the boat, and leaned toward me, whispering hoarsely, “Maybe the fat man—but more odds only Angie, Lenny, and the kid. I take care of Angie—you take care of Lenny, just in case she got a gun. But you listen to me, Camber—once I get that key, I have me a little fun with that Lenny.” He licked the slit where his lips should have been. “You read me, huh? Understand? I have me a little fun. I got an itch for that pig—Jesus Christ, I got an itch right down to my ankles. That pig’s going to play games like she never play before, and she ain’t no novice. No, sir. So you just keep hands off and don’t make no trouble for yourself—understand, Camber?”
“He understands, Mr. Shlakmann,” Alice replied softly.
11: The Boat
We moved toward the boat, which lay athwart the channel like a black hulk. From it, there came no sound, no glimmer of light, and were it not for the faint sparkle of its polished brass in the moonlight, I would have taken my oath that it was an old, abandoned hulk, left to rot in the swamp. But then a slight shift in our position brought its lines into silhouette, and I saw that it was no hulk, but a fine cruiser—the kind of boat that a man who cares for boats will dream about all of his life.
We approached it very slowly, dipping our oars slowly and giving our boat just enough motion to counteract the tidal flow and to move us ahead—so slowly that it must have taken at least ten minutes to cover the eighty or ninety yards. This was the heart of the Meadows, wild and silent and lonely, a seemingly endless wilderness of twisting channels and swaying reeds. I was aware of distant and delicate splashing, water snakes and muskrats, and once the rush of wings that told of a water fowl awakened and put to flight. Alice started and I almost dropped my oar. Shlakmann grinned a silvery, moonlit grin.
Larger and larger the cabin cruiser loomed, and then we were alongside of it. I had been wondering whether Shlakmann would be able to pull his great bulk on board, and then I saw that the cruiser was equipped with a small stair-ladder and a little landing float, a necessary convenience for the fat man, Montez. Shlakmann eased our boat in, and passed the bow rope around a stanchion on the float. Our boat swung in and nested against the landing float, the aluminum tapping, not a loud sound by any means, but seemingly loud and echoing in that quiet night. Alice and I crawled forward.
“The dame stays in the boat,” Shlakmann whispered. “You come with me.”
Alice began to protest, but I shook my head. “Do as he says now. Wait here. I’ll be all right.”
She stared at me, then nodded. Shlakmann had already started up the ladder. I followed him. At the top he paused, and behind him my eyes were just above the rail. There was the deck of the cruiser, a large, spacious deck, two lounge chairs covered in patterned chintz, and four folding chairs. At one side there was a portable bar, glasses, bottles, and an ice bucket. At the stern was a broad, curving bench or couch, and at first I did not see the figure of the man sprawled there. Then I noticed him and I thought he was asleep, but as Shlakmann stepped through onto the deck, this man leaped to his feet.
It was Angie, and for the moment he didn’t see me, still on the ladder and hidden by the rail.
“Shlakmann!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here now? Did Montez send you? I didn’t hear no boat.”
“You didn’t?” Shlakmann giggled.
I took that moment to clear the rail, and three steps brought me to the door to the cabin. Shlakmann was between Angie and myself, and as I opened the cabin door and plunged into the darkness there, I heard Angie cry, “Shlakmann, who the devil is that?”
“Camber.”
“Camber. You must be out of your mind. Who said to bring Camber here?”
“Nobody said to bring Camber here.”
“Does Montez know about this?”
“Montez don’t know one friggin’ thing, Angie—not one friggin’ thing.”
“Are you crazy, Shlakmann?”
“Sure. I’m crazy like a fox.”
The talk between the two of them was background. I heard other things. I stood in the Stygian blackness of the cabin, my heart pounding like a triphammer, and a woman’s voice called, “Is that you, Angie? I told you to stay out of here.”
A child’s voice said, “Lenny? Lenny?”
And then a lamp came on, Lenny sitting up in its light on the couch where she had been lying, her hand still on the lamp switch as she stared at me incredulously—and at the other end of the long couch, curled in a ball of gray coat and golden hair, my daughter. A moment later, I had her in my arms, my whole body shaking with dry sobs, while she complained, “Daddy, you squeeze too hard.”
Outside, Angie cried, “Shlakmann, you’re out of your mind. That’s the trouble with you—nuts. You’re nuts! You ain’t got a brain in that whole thick square head of yours!”
I have said that time was condensed; it raced, overlapped, and then stood still. I tried to think and plan and act, but my shaking hands found no key in either pocket of the gray coat.
“The key,” I heard Shlakmann say.
“The key,” I snapped at Lenny. “Where is it? It was in her coat pocket.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Daddy, I’m sleepy,” Polly said.
“Did you look?” I demanded of Lenny.
“Of course I looked. Don’t you think I thought of that?”
“Who else is here?”
“No one. Just the two of us. That’s Shlakmann outside. How did he get here
? How did you get here? Where’s Montez?”
I didn’t answer the questions. “Watch Polly,” I said to her, and then I went to the door.
Shlakmann stood only a few feet from the cabin door, his back to me. Angie, lithe, on the balls of his feet, stepping like a long cat, was moving slowly toward Shlakmann. Angie wore his brass knucks now, the knucks gleaming over his right hand, the small, bent claw of a beer-can opener peering out of his left hand. Beyond him, Alice crouched on the ladder outside the rail, her head and shoulders darkly visible.
“Come on, Angie,” Shlakmann taunted in a guttural singsong. “Come by me, you mongrel son-of-a-bitch—come, come, come, Angie! You know what I do—I break every bone in your friggin’ body, every bone. I got it planned, Angie. You know how long I say to myself, some day I break that Angie Cambosia into pieces—”
Angie darted in and out, like a mongoose. I saw a film once of a mongoose fighting a cobra; Angie was like that, in and out. I never saw a man move so quickly. He left his mark. Shlakmann let out a roar of rage and leaped after him. Angie dodged him. Shlakmann was facing me now, jacket open, shirt ripped away from his body, and down the front of his chest a long, dark streak where the can opener had sliced through his flesh.
Facing Angie, Shlakmann grinned. I call it a grin, but it wasn’t. It was something Shlakmann had learned to imitate in people; he pulled his mouth back from his teeth. He stood there, grinning at Angie and cursing him, and then he lunged at Angie and swung.
The blow would have finished Angie; human bone and flesh were not constructed to resist blows from Shlakmann. But Angie dodged again, and Shlakmann lost his footing, crashed into the bar, and sent bottles and glasses flying, and as he staggered past, Angie sent the brass-knuckled fist into the side of Shlakmann’s face, like a whiplash. Shlakmann swung around, and again Angie brought him up with a blow on the same side of his face.
The two blows tore Shlakmann’s cheek open, exposing the bone. He was strong as an ox, but his skin was soft and delicate. Roaring, bellowing with pain and rage, he crowded Angie, his two huge fists sending a wild flurry of blows that Angie miraculously avoided. And meanwhile, the brass knuckles and the can opener did their work. His body arching and weaving, Angie cut and cut and cut. Shlakmann’s shirt and jacket hung in shreds. His head was covered with blood, and blood ran from his neck and his arms and his chest and his back.
