“Can’t what?” he throws back at her, shouting now, enraged. “Live, breathe, save the lives of innocent animals, get in our own boat with the body of this girl you’ve never laid eyes on in your life? What, leave your stinking fucking island?”
They’re ranged round him in silhouette, the bonfire leaping behind them. The surf is like ice. The dinghy scrapes at the sand, the line tight, Josh pitching in now to get her afloat. He doesn’t bother to say Try me or repeat that they have no authority here because whatever he might have to say is just wasted breath at this point. “Get in the boat, Josh,” he says. “And anybody else who’s coming.”
The surf sucks out. He’s thigh deep now. “Cammy?” he shouts into the darkness. “Suzanne? You coming?” He gives it a beat, two. “Okay then,” he announces, “it’s your choice. We’re out of here.”
And when one of the hunters, he can’t tell which in the dark, comes for him, he’s ready, more than ready, the son of a bitch, the blind stupid pathetic interfering excuse for a human being, wrestling him down in the surf till they’re both soaked through, and in that crucial moment when one or the other of them is either going to have to relax his grip or drown, he breaks free to heave himself up onto the lip of the inflatable and kick the lurching white ball of the man’s face with every particle of hate he can summon. They’re cursing him. He’s cursing back. “Go ahead and shoot!” he screams. “Go ahead!” And then the engine catches, the boat swings round, and the sea rushes in to take all the burden out from under him.
The release is short-lived. As soon as they shove off they’re in trouble all over again. The seas are up because of the storm, the dinghy lifted and pounded in the breakers and a furious keening wind rising up out of nowhere to rake them down the length of the beach and away from the receding lights of the boat. The shoreline is black, the water blacker still. There are rocks out there, shoals, channels where the current can suck you in and flip you end over end in a heartbeat. Dave knows it and Wilson knows it too. Wilson’s fighting the tiller, the engine straining in a high continuous whine, and it’s as if they’re dead in the water. Minutes stretch out and snap, one after the other, until at long last they’re heading into the wind and the lights of the Paladin stabilize on the horizon and then begin to rush up on them. No one says a word, though Dave is seething, half a beat from shoving Wilson aside and taking the tiller himself, and when they get there, when finally they’re alongside the boat, the dinghy keeps lurching away from the stern while the Paladin rises and pitches at exactly the wrong moment till his nerves are stripped raw, and it’s all they can do to haul Kelly up on deck and stow the dinghy without killing themselves.
It’s all bad. He’s in a panic to get under way before the Coast Guard shows up, and how he’s going to avoid them out in the channel—or worse, back at the marina, where they’ll be sure to be waiting—he doesn’t know . . . but then, he keeps telling himself, he hasn’t done anything wrong. A girl dies tragically out in the middle of nowhere and you bring her back, isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be? You don’t stand around with your hands in your pockets listening to Alma Boyd Takesue, you drag her out of the water and rush her to the hospital so they can pronounce her dead and take it from there. Maybe he does want the Coast Guard, after all. Definitely, once they’re at sea, he’s going to have to put out a distress call. Make it official. Do things by the book. Show that they’re not trying to hide anything whether they were trespassing or not because the only thing that matters here is getting medical attention for this girl. . . right? But why is he making speeches to himself? And why isn’t the anchor up? Why isn’t he at the helm? Why, for shit’s sake, aren’t they under way?
All three of them are dripping wet, that’s why, shivering, banging into each other like zombies as they fling themselves around the cabin, stripping off their wet clothes and tearing through the locker for anything dry—a blanket, a sweatshirt, shorts, socks, a windbreaker so stained with oil it’s translucent. Their faces are drawn. They won’t look each other in the eye. The cabin has never seemed so cramped and inadequate. “We need to get out of here,” he keeps saying but he can’t seem to stop shivering. The electric heater’s up full. Wilson’s already at the stove, boiling water for tea. “Or hot cocoa, man, what do you want? Josh? Dave?”
Then, finally—it can’t have been more than ten minutes, fifteen at the outside—he’s at the helm, the anchor’s up and he’s nosing the bow out to sea. Everything lurches, the waves hitting them broadside, then they’re stern to the wind and cruising east along the atramental flank of the island, nothing before them and nothing behind, not even the glow of the bonfire. Warmth trickles up from below. He’s in dry clothes now, wearing a sweater over a flannel shirt buttoned right up to the collar, but his hair, wet still, chills the back of his neck like a cold dead hand laid there, like Kelly’s hand. After a while the scent of hot chocolate begins to waft up the stairs and he swallows involuntarily, suddenly aware of how hungry he is. In the next moment Wilson and Josh are in the cockpit with him and he’s got a mug of hot chocolate cradled between his thighs and a handful of saltines smeared with peanut butter vibrating on the seat beside him.
“Shit,” Wilson offers, “what a day, huh?”
“Worst day of my life,” Josh says in a hollow monotone. “I still can’t believe it.”
“Me either.” Wilson’s leaning forward over his knees, adulterating his cocoa with a splash of no-name scotch out of a pint bottle. “Josh?” He hoists the bottle, gives it a wag.
“Sure,” Josh murmurs, holding out his cup even as the boat bucks and half the liquid rides up out of it to slosh over the deck. And carpet.
“Dave?”
“No, not for me. I’ve got to keep my head clear here, because we’re in the shit now—in so many ways I can’t begin to tell you. Soon as we’re in cell phone range I’m calling Sterling.”
“What, the lawyer?’
He’s picturing Sterling sitting down to dinner with his dried-up stick of a wife, droning on in his dead-and-buried court voice about whatever case he’s on—or maybe he’s telling jokes, mixing a shaker of martinis, getting down in some dance club with a woman in a low-cut top with her boobs hanging out who definitely isn’t his wife, who can say? He doesn’t know a thing about the man, except that he bills like an extortionist.
“Yeah,” he says, “I need to find out where we stand. I mean, I don’t really feature the Coast Guard boarding us, you know what I mean? We’ve got to put out a Mayday at some point, but I’m thinking that’s when we see the lights of the harbor in about”—he checks his watch—“two and a quarter hours maybe. And then they can do whatever they want, take our statements, unload the body, bring in the detectives and the coroner and whoever else. In fact, I want Sterling there. On the fucking dock.”
“But we’re not in trouble”—Josh’s voice is so reduced it’s barely audible over the thrash of the waves and the steady throb of the engine—“are we?”
Wilson shakes his head. “No way. They’re going to want a statement—we’re witnesses, right? Or you are. You saw her die, right? So it’s like a car accident or something, where you witnessed it and the cops want to know who, where, when and why, that sort of thing.”
There’s a sudden punch at the bow, a rogue wave moving out of sync with the prevailing seas, and they’re weightless a moment before slamming down into the trough and rising back up again, the boat shivering along its length. And then once more, the slap, the rise, the plunge, only this time, on the way down something slams at the cabin door and it takes them all a moment to realize what it is.
“We got to bring her in,” Josh says, staggering to his feet.
“Leave her,” Dave says, thinking of the mess, of the sand and the wet and whatever fluids might be leaking out of her at this point. Aren’t you supposed to loose your bowels when you die? Didn’t he read that someplace?
“Leave her? This is a human being we’re talking about.”
“A fo
rmer human being.”
“You son of a bitch. Fuck you. Cammy’s right. If it wasn’t for you—”
He’s on the cusp of getting up out of the chair and laying into this baby-faced whining kid who might as well be in diapers he’s so pathetic because who does he think he is—who the fuck does he think he is—to talk to him like that, when Wilson, the voice of reason, intercedes. “What if she goes overboard?”
“She’s not going anywhere.”
“But if she does—”
They’re right. Of course they’re right. Lose the body and it looks as if they’re covering up, as if there’s been foul play, murder even. Suddenly he’s ashamed of himself for even thinking this way. Until today he’s never seen a dead person in his life, and here he is, plotting like a criminal, like one of the killers themselves. “Yeah, okay,” he says finally. “Bring her in. But don’t lay her on any of the bunks or the couch either. Just on the deck, okay?”
The door flings open on a smell of the open sea and in the next moment Josh is backing his way in, dragging Kelly along with him, but he can’t manage it all on his own and Wilson gets up to help. Dead weight. The expression comes home to him in a way it never has, never could have, until now. She’s half-in the door, half-out. The boat dips, rises. There’s a smell of something else now, of feces, urine. And then the poncho, a cheap rubberized thing not worth the cost of it, already peeling in places, splits down the side as Josh, bending to the task, tries to get a purchase on it, and there she is, Kelly, sprawled across the stain-resistant carpet, staring up at him all over again.
The digital display on the dash of the car reads 2:15 by the time he swings into the driveway and flicks the remote to roll back the gate. He’s so exhausted he can barely turn the wheel, headlights raking over the lawn and nothing there, no humped-over thieves of the night or overfed housecats on the prowl, just grass, lush and deep and evenly cut, and when he pulls up to the garage and kills the engine he can only sit there, incapable of mustering the strength to push open the door. He can picture the entry hall, the steps up to the bedroom, his bed with its cool sheets and overstuffed pillows and the off-white bedspread his mother crocheted for him, but he remains where he is, frozen there, listening to the heat ticking out of the engine till the motion sensor over the garage abruptly kills the light. Thinking of Anise—he’s got to call her, no matter how late it is—and then of the dogs, locked up all this time in the house, he pushes open the door and the light clicks back on again. Then he’s out on the pavement, standing in his own driveway, at his own house, safe behind the locked gate. He breathes in the night air, lets his head roll back on the fulcrum of his neck so that the sky comes to life above him, the stars on full display and the rain blown out to sea. If it even rained here. Everything is silent, but for the faint muffled whimper of the dogs at the front door.
Of course, there’s shit in the entry hall but he’s got no one to blame for that but himself—he thought he would have been back six or seven hours ago. The dogs are there to greet him, thrashing round his legs before slipping guiltily out into the night, and he leaves the door ajar and goes into the kitchen to see if they need food. Their kibble bowl is empty. Ditto the water bowl. He pours dry food out of the bag, refills the water bowl from the tap, and then leans back against the counter, utterly drained. His mouth is dry, his lips cracked. He pours himself a glass of water and then, unbidden, the idea of food steals into his head—there’s Asiago in the reefer, tomato, avocado, half a loaf of oatnut bread—and right after, the thought of liquor. A shot of something to deaden him. The liquor cabinet gives up its glints of glass, brown, clear and green, and he thinks first of tequila before he remembers the white rum in the freezer. The first shot clears his head, the second starts up his heart again. The sandwich is in the microwave and the dogs clacking their nails on the tile floor and noisily lapping water when he picks up the phone and punches in Anise’s number.
It rings three times and goes to her voice mail. There’s a maddening pause followed by a repeated guitar figure and her strong soaring soprano singing distantly in the background before her recorded voice delivers the standard greeting: “Hi, this is Anise. I’m not here right now. Please leave a message at the beep. Or tone. Or whatever.”
He dials her home phone and lets it ring, seven, eight, nine times, then hangs up and tries the cell again. Finally, just before the recording clicks in, she answers. “You know what time it is?” Her voice is drugged, sleep-thickened.
“I just got back.”
A pause. “Just?”
“It was a fucking nightmare. The worst. You can’t imagine—you’re lucky you weren’t there, you were the smart one.”
“You didn’t get caught, did you?”
“Worse, much worse.”
“What?” All the lethargy is gone from her voice now. He can picture her sitting up in bed, her eyes squinted and her lips pursed in concentration. “Did you wreck the boat or somebody fell overboard or what?”
“Somebody died.”
“Died? What do you mean died?”
“Kelly.” He’s angry suddenly, angry again. All this because of some spastic uncoordinated overweight college girl who couldn’t keep her balance to save her life, literally. Carrying a placard around in a parking lot is one thing and going into the backcountry is another. He doesn’t know what he was thinking. He should have stuck with Wilson. Just him and Wilson. And no reporters either. “She’s dead,” he says. “She fell”—and he’s seeing her all over again, the drained flesh and disarranged limbs, flat white where everything else was dun and gray and green—“out on the island. At Willows. There was nothing we could do . . .”
There’s a muffled exclamation on the other end of the line, a selfreflexive curse, muttered low. “Were the police—? Or the Coast Guard?”
He doesn’t want to get into it, doesn’t even know why he called. Or no: he called because he needs to hear her voice, needs comfort—needs, above all, to get this out of him, because no matter how exhausted he is he won’t be able to sleep, he knows that already. “I want you to come over.”
“Come over? I can’t come over. I was in the middle of sleeping, I’ve got work tomorrow. I’m singing at Cold Spring, don’t you remember? The early gig? Five p.m.?”
There were two cop cars waiting at the marina when he pulled into the slip, lights revolving as if they’d just made a traffic stop, and it was the Coast Guard escorting him in for good measure. An ambulance was there too, its own lights chopping up the scene in alternating slices of amber and red, and a rotating cast of gapers and gawkers and half-dead bums roused from the bushes by the prospect of a show. Sterling, looking alert and dressed officially in three-piece suit and tie, kept the police at bay—and kept him from spending the night in jail on a report of criminal trespass radioed in by Alma Boyd Takesue, through Ranger Richard Melman, on behalf of her colleague Annabelle Yuell of the Nature Conservancy. All three of them, even Wilson, were cited and released on their promise to appear in court, at the same time Sterling, a fine sheen of bluster and outrage on his face, insisted on their filing a police report citing Alma and the foreign hunters on the grounds of assault and battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress in preventing them from taking the injured—that is, dead—girl to the hospital. Alma was on the island. Sterling was right there standing at the desk in the police station, immovable, his face carved of stone. The report was filed. Josh went home. Wilson went home. Dave went home.
“I need to talk to you,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
“You don’t understand—we’re screwed, it’s over. Toni Walsh—you should have seen the look on her face. She’s going to crucify me.”
There’s a silence on the other end of the line.
“Come over,” he says.
“Sleep on it, Dave.”
The finality in her voice infuriates him. “No”—he’s shouting suddenly, and the dogs, alarmed, back away from their dish
in a scramble of frantic clacking paws—“you fucking sleep on it! I need you. Don’t you hear me?”
A pause. Then, utterly unruffled, calm as a sedative, her voice seeps back to him in a slow drip of unforgiving syllables: “Good night, Dave. See you in the morning.”
He wakes, embittered, just after noon. At what hour he finally did fall off to sleep after lying there staring at the ceiling and listening to every least crepitation of the house as if it were amplified ten times over, he can’t say, but the moment he blinks open his eyes, all the misery and dislocation of the previous day rush in to repossess him. The morning’s gone. If Anise called—or Wilson or Sterling or anybody else, the AP wanting a statement, the Hog Butchers’ Journal, Harley Meachum telling him all four stores burned to the ground simultaneously—he didn’t hear the phone ring. And he’s too sore, mentally and physically, even to think about checking his messages. Fuck them, that’s what he’s thinking. Fuck the world. Fuck them all.
Barefoot, in a pair of shorts and a flannel shirt, he goes to the door to let the dogs out and continues on down the drive, walking gingerly, to retrieve the morning paper (which will have nothing in it yet, he knows that, Toni Walsh stuck out there on the island till it was too late to do anything about it, but he can’t help scanning the thing nonetheless). No, no mention. But tomorrow will be a different story. Tomorrow the shitstorm starts in all over again, a hurricane of it, Force 10 winds, and he’s wondering vaguely if he should write up his own version of events and post it on the FPA website as a counterweight to whatever Toni Walsh is going to lay on him, when he hears the phone ringing in the depths of the house.
He’s up the front steps and back inside, snatching up the phone in the living room on the fourth ring—and wincing, wincing too, because he must have pulled every muscle in his body out there yesterday, a pure searing jolt of pain rocketing from his left knee to his groin so that he has to fling himself down in the nearest chair and grab hold of the inside of his thigh and squeeze till it passes. “Hello?” he snaps, expecting Anise.