Caught (29 page)

Drink? Slaney asked.

I’d like to get going, Brophy said. Slaney stood and counted out some money and tucked it under the plate and he looked out at the ocean.

There was a commotion on the beach. Someone was screaming. A woman on the beach was crippled up and bent with the effort of making herself heard. Begging and pointing toward the water. Flinging her arm out toward the horizon, grabbing at people.

There was a swimmer a long way out. Slaney could see someone’s head, a silhouette, far away, or it was a buoy. He gripped the wooden railing that separated the restaurant from the beach and leapt over it, and ran to the edge of the water. He yelled over his shoulder to Brophy to come help.

Somebody’s drowning out there, let’s go, he shouted. He’d taken off his shoes as he ran and when he got back later the shoes were still there, but far apart from each other. He remembered taking one shoe off, because he’d had to hop-hop with his foot in both hands before he could toss it. The other one must have come off by itself.

He’d taken off his T-shirt too. He would have no memory of doing that.

Another man with a lifeguard ring was ahead of him and got to the drowning woman first. This man and the woman were going under together and whatever they said was underwater. She must have been shouting, You’re coming with me. And he must have shouted, No, you’re coming with me.

But the language was bubbled and came out silvery and wiggling and broke apart before it got to the surface. On the surface there was just the sucking up of sky and foam and the language went in backwards and garbled and on the surface there was love and desperation and a war of save me, save me.

She was the kind of strong that could hoist a car over her head if she wanted, but what she wanted, with all her might, was to drown the guy who got there first.

The guy was speaking Spanish. Slaney didn’t hear it but he formed the impression it was Spanish. He was from there and handsome, these were Slaney’s impressions; and he also had an animal strength, just like the woman, and if they ever made love, the two of them, children would burst out of her forehead and all that was wrong would be okay. But they were not making love, there was so much hate it boiled the water. She threw her arms around and she sank back down and was gone from them for long stretches so they could only see her white bikini like a glimmer of light in the murk and the blooming flower of her hair.

She was going to stand on the Mexican guy’s shoulders to keep her chin out of the water whether he liked it or not. She had the authority of a person who refuses to see reason, or is lit up with a reason all her own. She wanted the Mexican guy to be standing on the shoulders of another man, possibly Slaney, and for there to be more men all the way to the bottom. All she really wanted was a lungful of air.

The guy had a family, Slaney thought, he had that look, or that was another one of the impressions formed later, on the drive back. Like Slaney, the guy had ended up in the water without ever considering what he was doing.

They had not thought, None of my business. They had not thought, What about if something happens out there, or that she deserved what she got for being so bloody stupid, for wandering out so far. And they had found themselves in an awkward threesome where she had laid down the law: she would get what she wanted any way she could. The claw marks on Slaney’s back were something when they got out.

And the Mexican guy, too, was bleeding from the corner of his eye. She had taken pieces out of his face with her fingernails.

Slaney popped her in the jaw. It was her jaw or her temple and he was not careful. No decision was made. It was done before he knew it. He could not remember it but he knew it happened, the way you know something someone tells you. He knew it second-hand. He would never have believed it if he hadn’t been told by a reliable source. He was the source. It was exactly the right measure of violence. He’d never hit a girl before. He had time to think that.

She was still wearing the mask and the water was sloshing inside the glass window and her eyes were screaming but — and this he could swear to, this was something he’d never seen before and did not want to see again — he saw the eyes roll back in her head. First a fluttering of one eyelid that looked flirtatious. A nerve with a mind of its own in her eyelid. The ecstasy of giving up. He saw that.

That’s what he hadn’t wanted to see. It was a bad precedent. If giving up felt that good he might like it. That’s what he thought. He never wanted to try it. Giving up was all or nothing. The woman had given up.

The Mexican guy was swimming away and Slaney lost sight of him from one wave to another. There, not there. He was swimming out toward the horizon and Slaney found he was yelling over the waves and he had to prop her up, and really, the situation was boring. They were almost done and where did that bastard think he was going? The guy came back with the ring. He had gone to get the ring.

She had knocked the ring out of his arms and he’d got it back and Slaney had her in a loose headlock, face up, and his other arm linked into the ring.

Then there were two other men. And it was just as well because Slaney was done and the Mexican guy was done too. The other two guys lifted her out of the waves and when they did Slaney thought to put his feet down and saw he was up to his waist. The hardest part was the last few waves that drove him into the upside-down sand and he crawled out on his hands and knees.

He lay there and waited to breathe. When he pulled himself up, the woman broke out of the thick crowd that had surrounded her. The other man had gone. The Mexican had been swallowed up in a separate crowd that had gathered. The woman came over to Slaney and put her arms around his neck and rested her head on his chest. He put his hand on her heart. He was feeling the heartbeat. It was so off-kilter and bewildering. Her skin was bewildering and a strand of her hair and the way she pressed against him and her crazy little beating thing of a heart under his hand. That was just an instant, of course. Then it was over and she went back to being whoever she was and Slaney looked for his T-shirt.

Brophy was standing in the sand in his black socks. He held his shoes, a finger hooked into each heel. Slaney picked up his clothes as they headed back to the Jeep. He remembered he had to pay for the meal, and then he remembered he had paid already.

You want a beer? Brophy said.

No thanks, I’d like to get moving, Slaney said.

I have a heart condition, Brophy said. I couldn’t leave the money. My heart is bad. I would have just been in the way out there. You would have had to rescue me.

Let’s go, Slaney said. I don’t want to be out in the dark with all this cash.

There was only that brute thing, Slaney thought. There was only the pop he’d given that girl and the way she had allowed him to keep her alive and how important it had been for her to succumb.

They drove back to the hostel. Brophy said he’d like to help Slaney with the boat, if they needed help on board, but he couldn’t do heavy lifting. Slaney invited him in for a drink and he bought a couple of beers from the maid and they sat out on the deck of the hostel in wooden lawn chairs.

He’d had a clogged artery a while back and his arm would tingle, Brophy told him. He’d wake up; the arm would be asleep. There would be pins and needles. This was his right arm, hanging off his shoulder. He’d spent a weekend drinking at his brother’s stag and then the wedding and he’d turned grey.

The colour of that there, he said. He tapped the grey weathered wood of his armrest with his finger. Everything went funny. It had a funny aspect.

My vision, he said. He swayed a hand in the air. My son came to get me at the airport and I told him. My arm, I said. Brophy touched Slaney’s arm as he said it.

I told him I’d been throwing up, and I broke a sweat right there at the luggage thing.

The carousel, Slaney said. Brophy was stirring the air with his finger. He nodded. Waiting for my luggage.

He was the one that said a heart attack, Brophy said. He called it. My son called the damn thing.

Slaney had the suitcase of money for the Mexican authorities tucked in under his chair.

What he thought was this. He believed the story about the heart attack, but it had a different cadence than everything else Brophy had said. He was thinking: the heart attack is true, but everything else has been a lie.

They were relying on the Mexicans to be corrupt. It was a hell of an assumption. It was easy for Hearn. Hearn was in Vancouver. Hearn was getting ready for the life after his life of crime. As if there wasn’t a tide of events to swim against. It was a merciless quality in Hearn. He didn’t respect those who doubted themselves.

Hearn was a contemptuous bastard to those who had doubts.

Brophy was talking about his condition. He said there were things he’d had to give up because of his heart. He spoke about diet.

You wonder if it’s worth it, Brophy said. Slaney took a quick peek at him then, glanced over. Because this statement had come from a deep place, a peeling down of facade. Brophy wasn’t aware that he’d said it out loud.

It was a tone of disappointment. The guy was deflated. He was sick and unsure of himself. Why hadn’t Hearn checked him out? It wasn’t Hearn with a yacht full of weed parked under the noses of the Mexican authorities, owing for fuel and supplies.

Slaney felt the teeter-totter inside him shift. He was dropping from trust to doubt. If he had to pinpoint the moment. There had been a moment and it was when Brophy spoke about it all being worth something.

He had spoken with the authority of a man who had suffered. He was a broken sort of man, Slaney decided. He had been broken not by something big, but the grinding of a thousand small things to which he himself had agreed. He had made concessions.

Brophy had gone into the bank and he came out with the money. His shirt was buttoned up in the heat. You wonder if it’s worth it. Slaney knew that every lie commingled with the truth.

But you could not spend an afternoon with a man who had suffered a heart attack, who had come near death because he could not control his cholesterol, and not experience some minor revelation. Something would be revealed and Slaney could already see it. This guy wasn’t what he said he was. There would be double-crosses, for which Slaney had to allow; there was a double-cross in the works. But the nature of it mattered.

Hearn didn’t know the guy. But it was a question of how deep the double-cross went. It was a question: should he grab the bag of money and run down the beach with it? Should he tell Ada?

It was because Slaney had saved the drowning woman. Slaney and the Mexican and the other men. But it had been Slaney who did the thinking out there. He’d knocked her out and saved all their lives.

It was instinct or he had thought about it. A sharp jab to the jaw. Brophy was drowning too.

What kind of man stands on shore and watches a woman drowning? A man with a bad heart.

Brophy was talking about his daughter. The daughter had lost faith in him. That was the story. Some distancing had occurred. She’d become frustrated with him. She’d left. Walked away.

He was telling about the wild spirit in his daughter. It was a quality Brophy had admired when she was a child. He talked to Slaney about her as a four-year-old. He said about her gymnastics. He said triple somersaults. It was something he’d tried to encourage.

She doesn’t understand responsibility, Brophy said, tossing the beer bottle into the bushes beside the deck. But he didn’t go on about his daughter after that.

Patterson had intuited a new quiet in Slaney. He knew he’d said something wrong but he could not imagine what it was. He was afraid the smallest thing might cause the kid to give up now. Patterson had thought nobody could give up after coming so far, but maybe the opposite was true. Maybe the kid had come too far. Maybe he’d feel like it was time to turn back. Slaney might give up and leave Carter and Ada Anderson and get the hell out.

I suppose I should get going, Brophy said. Slaney drank down the rest of his beer too. He stood up and got the bag of money from under the chair and hefted the strap over his shoulder.

Slaney thought of the goat they’d passed on the drive back from the beach. The Jeep had dipped down in a rut and bounced up and they were passing the garage where they’d had the tire fixed. The white, white goat was eating a screamingly red blouse. It lifted its head and shut its eyes against the dust they were kicking up.

It came to Slaney then. The revelation he’d waited for, drinking his beer in the bar. The revelation that had hovered over his fist like a butterfly, his innermost thing, while he drank his beer and watched the woman put her mask and snorkel on, while he watched her awkward walk over the sand in her flippers.

He wouldn’t return to the port where they were waiting.

Where Hearn was waiting; where the transport trucks were waiting; and the caves were waiting and the men and whatever Brophy had in store for them, the dogs and the sirens and the guns and the cuffs.

He’d alter their course at the last minute. He’d explain it to Carter once they were on the sailboat and Carter would see the wisdom. The wisdom ran like this: Let them all wait.

Maybe You Thought a Vacation

Patterson approached Ada
when she walked into the bar.

Hello, Roy, she said. I’d heard you were here. Lovely to see you again. I’m just looking for Cyril.

Patterson told her he’d had a few drinks with Carter, sent him back to the hostel about an hour ago.

I must have missed him, she said.

Why don’t you have a quick drink with me, Ada, Patterson said. He pinched the sleeve of her peasant blouse near the cuff and gave it a playful little tug.

I don’t know, Roy, she said. Cyril’s probably in a bad way. I should get back to the hostel.

You guys are setting sail tomorrow, Patterson said. I have to talk to you. He took her by the wrist now.

Hey, she said. She flicked her arm free but she followed him to the back of the bar where there was an empty table next to the back door. The door was ajar and a band of harsh sunlight fell over the floor. She could hear the chickens outside clucking and step-stepping, the ruffling of wings. Someone was out there scattering feed, speaking in Spanish, cooing and cajoling.