Carter Beats the Devil (76 page)

A few minutes later, he knocked softly on the door of one of the thirty-two rooms. Resting on a featherbed, though not exactly asleep, was Phoebe. She still wore her evening dress. She’d washed her face of the charcoal and grime from the previous evening. Her eyeglasses were folded on the night table.

“Are we done?” she asked, her voice groggy, raising herself up on an elbow.

“You have to keep me awake for twenty-four hours.”

She sat up. “I can do that.”

. . .

The beach was his idea. She asked if he were obsessed with beaches, reminding him he’d attempted to take her to Neptune Beach in the dead of summer. “I like the beach,” he said in full explanation.

Ocean Beach in November, an hour after dawn, was an empty playground. Two people alone, walking barefoot in the surf. Up by the retaining wall was a still life: a pair of socks, a pair of silk hose, and two pairs of evening shoes, scuffed and battered. The day was warm, though not so warm that Phoebe didn’t accept Carter’s jacket as they walked in their bare feet to the waterline.

“The last time I borrowed your jacket—” she began.

“If you try to go this time,” he said slowly, “I’m going to sit on top of you and squash you like a sandwich.”

She poked her tongue into her cheek. “Charles, did you really kill the President?”

“That’s a complicated question.”

“No, it’s not.”

“How terribly do you want to know?”

“I’m prepared to behave very badly.”

The tide was out, so there was a wide swath of dry sand, then damp and yielding sand, then the hard-packed sand on which seashells and driftwood were littered. Carter felt all the gradations from hard to soft underfoot, as he imagined Phoebe feeling them. Seagulls carried mollusks from the shore and to the concrete pathways, dropping them so they shattered, and they could have their breakfast.

“I’m amazed by everything,” he said.

“Said the man on cocaine and morphine. All you need is some marijuana and you could join a jazz band.”

His hand was throbbing, as was his head. He had a glass vial with pills in it, but he didn’t want to take them.

Phoebe approached the tide, and backed away. “Say, how does my dress look, anyway?”

“I owe you a new one. You should go in the water if you want.”

“Can you afford to buy me a new dress?”

“I think so. Even with the hand,” he waved his splint.

“Did the doctors tell you how it will heal?”

He nodded. “They can do amazing things these days. They said something about attaching tendons to other muscles and reeducating the hand . . . but . . .” His voice trailed off, because what the doctors could do struck him as somehow irrelevant. “Also, there’s a magician, I’ve been trying to remember his name all night, who worked the Continent a hundred years ago with two fingers missing. I’m hoping he wrote a pamphlet. But . . .” Again, he left the word hanging.

Phoebe stood with her body pointing toward the ocean, knees bent, her skirt hiked an inch or so up, her face toward him, listening, and then the surf rushed up over her ankles, which made her cry out. She dropped the end of her dress so that its very edge was buoyed on the water. “I should just accept it,” she said, returning to walking, carefully, south, water sluicing around her feet. Carter rolled his trousers to his knees.

“You said ‘but’ a minute ago,” she said.

He couldn’t retrieve what he meant. “You remember how I said I liked how you couldn’t see what I did for a living? It’s like that.” He’d never seen an X ray of himself before. He’d been surprised to find his inner workings were exactly the same as the next man’s. It made him peculiarly optimistic. “I love magic, it’s wonderful, but when it came down to it last night, you were more important.” He was thinking how life was all motion and transformation. From boy to magician and no way
to turn back. And from a husband into a widower, and again, there was no turning back. His soul was once choked with grief that had now vanished by a method he hardly understood. He stood with one hand operative, the other ruined. It made him feel like he might be both a magician
and
a man.

She took his left hand. They walked for a few feet, and then Carter stopped to kiss her.

“That’s nice,” Phoebe sighed, for his hand had cupped her breast. A moment later, she stood outside of his embrace. “I need to think,” she said.

“That’s a bad idea,” and again she found his hand on her breast.

“Please tell me there aren’t forty Marines and a school bus full of children hiding downwind. Charlie, if we went to bed, you’d fall asleep afterward and I couldn’t have that on my conscience, I’d feel like a praying mantis.”

“I’m willing to risk it.”

“How hard did you get hit in the head, anyway?”

“Not hard enough.”

She took his arm and forcefully started them to walking again. She told him to imagine the waves against his feet as God’s own cold shower. She asked him to describe the ocean: Were there any ships at sea? Tramp steamers or yachts or liners? Where did he think the ships were going?

The sun hit the pebbles and shells so they glowed. Even the chains of kelp draped across the sand looked fertile and sweet like grapevines.

She was being quiet. A stiffness to her walk, and then she whispered, “Excuse me” and walked directly inland. He followed her.

When she was in dry sand, she sat, knees up, her head braced against them, expression hidden. Her thicket of black hair rustled in the breeze.

He sat beside her, sat on her right in case he needed to reach out and comfort her. How long did they sit that way? Carter, for whom time was increasingly elastic, put his arm around her. She folded up her glasses and dropped them into a battered leather case.

“I killed a man,” she said, sounding sickly.

He nodded. “I thought you seemed too cool about it.”

“What? Mysterioso. No, not him.”

“So you’ve killed someone before?” he chuckled. Somehow the drugs had made him misinterpret her, which amused him.

“I can’t believe I’m actually telling someone this.”

He hadn’t misunderstood. His mind jumped from word to word: manslaughter, self-defense, traffic accident, buck fever.

“I was so sure I could just tell you I was thirty-one years old. I didn’t
know what kind of path I was taking when I said that. I used to imagine I would dictate my memoirs when I was eighty to some bright-eyed girl who was sent to the Home to look after cranky old Phoebe, and I imagined telling her about the man I murdered, and her being terribly scared of me.” She shook her head. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about Sarah. That was an accident. I killed a man on purpose.”

“Every time a layer gets peeled away,” he murmured.

“You don’t have to hear this. We can keep on walking.”

Carter felt inadequate—as with the long-ago brank, he wanted to know, and
not
to know. “Who was he?”

“This was back when I could see. His name was—” She said nothing further. Carter was prepared to know the name. He felt, to his marrow, that he and Phoebe were made for such coincidence. She sighed, “John Osborn.” Then, “Dr. John Osborn.”

Carter squinted. No, he’d never heard that name.

“My Johnnie,” she continued. She said more: she had loved him, and he was a sweet and pure soul, and he said he was going to marry her even though his family had forced him to become engaged to another. “It’s an old story,” she said, drawing designs in the sand, “which didn’t help me much when I ended up at Borax’s. ‘Oh, you, too,’ one woman after another with exactly the same story. And I kept trying to explain that it was different, it had happened to me. Me!”

She asked if he remembered how Borax had a wonderful stream that ran by the cottages, and if you followed it long enough it became a wild pool where ducks sometimes waded in pairs. At the edge of the pool pine needles and oak leaves and the occasional branch settled in a tiny harbor. Every day, there was a greater accumulation. It began to feel like her own private project, like she was supervising the construction of a new world. But as she watched one afternoon everything emptied, all the leaves, everything, back into the stream, and disappeared over the rocks. And it caused her to burst into tears because she realized she was no more important than anything else.

“Of course,” she whispered, “there was this very sad mahatma who kept coming by. I used to wish I could see him do something. I thought it would cheer both of us up.”

Carter heard barking in the distance—coming up from the south at a brisk trot, along the shoreline, were some dogs. There was no sign of an owner, but this wasn’t a surprise, for there were many strays here, living on fish and food thrown to them from the Cliff House, to the north. “Were you still there when I performed?”

“You performed at Borax’s?”

The dogs were crossing in front of them. One was tall and shaggy, and the other white and low to the ground. They sniffed at the seaweed together, and then tugged on either end of a stick before the taller one seemed to hear an attractive noise to the north. He barked, and the other one followed him, and they vanished over a sand dune. Carter cleared his throat. “Shortly after Black Christmas. What, a week after? Something about that woman’s story . . . I think you keep being reborn and you never know when. I was inspired to return to magic by the story of that poor woman dying and so I performed for the women then.”

She pursed her lips. Her bottle-green eyes, eyes like emeralds, eyes like oceans, they were watering. “Oh, sweetheart. Oh Charlie,” she whispered. “I never died.”

He was about to correct her. It was like she’d sung a popular song, only gotten the lyrics wrong, and he was just about to say, “No, it’s
she
never died,” when all of a sudden he could hardly think at all.

“I inspired you?” she whispered.

He swallowed. “You’re the woman who . . .”

“I am.”

“But they said you died.”

“Everyone thinks that.”

“I don’t understand.” He played the details in his head: a man coming back for his woman, then locking her in a cabin, burning it to the ground, killing her. He began to feel anger at Borax. He’d made Carter buy into a sad story.

“Everything Borax said was true,” Phoebe said, “except one thing. Johnnie didn’t escape to Mexico.” She swallowed. “I might have to stop, but I’ll try. After Johnnie had stabbed me. In the stomach. The knife was so slippery with my blood, he dropped it. I stabbed him right through the throat. And I ran out of the cabin, which was on fire. I was losing blood. The flames went past me, and I had to get through them, so I crawled, and the smoke was making me cough. I felt if I coughed hard enough, I’d come apart. Then I saw I was almost out of it, just a little ways to go, and I was thinking, my love had wanted to murder me, and this was the worst thing that could ever happen. That’s when I ran through the burning poison oak.”

Her blind eyes were directed toward the dunes, beyond which the dogs were barking. Every once in a while, one or the other raced within view, then away again. Carter watched her turn in profile. She looked remote and classical, like an image stamped on a coin.

She didn’t tell him the rest, though he could imagine it. Borax hiding her from the prosecution reserved for unwed, immoral girls who stabbed respectable men. A life at the Home, where the choices were piety or bitterness. Gin. He felt very small, a child playing with pretty seashells while all around him roiled the great undiscovered and depthless ocean.

“You’re the trade.” He straightened.

“What?”

“Borax told me he would trade me something for television. He meant you.”

“Ah, how nice to be chattel.” She shook her head. “He did help keep me away from jail. He reminded me of that in his telegram. I think he was trying to trade me and keep my loyalty at the same time. How nice to be Borax.”

“That’s the part you wouldn’t tell me about, then?”

She nodded. “The funny thing is how life can find you again despite yourself. I was going to marry a doctor, and then I thought I was going to wear a veil at Borax’s, and then I was drunk and blind, and then I was accepting how alone I was. Then who do I meet? A magician. And I love you. I didn’t know I could do that again.”

“Hold on.” Carter focused very hard on the sand in front of him. Then on her. “If you—wait.”

“I’m waiting.”

“If I understand your story, your name can’t possibly be Phoebe Kyle.”

“It isn’t.”

He looked at a pelican splashing into the ocean. He looked up, tilting his head back, looking straight into the air. He wanted to know. He didn’t want to know. “Is your name—”

“No.”

She was smiling. In fact, she began to chuckle. He pressed on, “It’s not—”

“No. But wouldn’t that be amazing if it
were
Sarah?” She was tickled by the idea, and continued to laugh. “I come to you prophecy-free.”

“The prophecy-free life,” he said. “I like that.” He picked up sand and made a fist of it. Drained it out, like an hourglass. Swept up another fistful of sand, let it drain again.

They sat in the sand in their tattered and stained evening clothes, discussing their scars. And Phoebe told him something he’d never heard: in China, the women who’d had their feet bound could recognize their kind from across the marketplace from how they walked.
Their loping motion, the lotus gait, bespoke a life of suffering, or beauty, depending on how one accounted for it. “You have that,” she said. “I knew it the first moment we met.”

It broke his heart. He wanted to protect her and dazzle her with kisses and restore her sight and give her back all the things she had lost. Which he couldn’t. “We have it together,” he said.

“That’s why we can talk.”

. . .

They had the rest of the day to stay awake. South, there was a café that Carter knew where they sold Italian coffee. Beyond that his plans were vague.

There were never moments in your life when you actually saw something end, for whether you knew it or not something else was always flowering. Never a disappearance, always a transformation.

In his youth, Carter had believed everything was possible. Then in grief, he believed everything was impossible. And now, the very moment he stood, pulling Phoebe up with him, he felt that when you had lived enough of your life, there was no difference between the two.