Dead Aim (2 page)

T
he sun was already high, but a thin, misty layer of cloud veiled it and gave it a rainbow aureole. Mallon was glad it was not fierce and glaring, the way it could be along this beach in midsummer when the sea reflected it in painful flashes and the high pressure set in to kill the breeze. He sat on a rock beneath the cliffs and watched a squadron of pelicans flying just above the water two hundred yards out, where the big kelp beds began. He watched one of them swoop up, then plummet downward in the graceless, folded jumble that pelicans made of themselves, crash into the water, and emerge with a silvery, flapping fish. The other pelicans wheeled and spread out, working the school as the first had.

Mallon was always pleased to see them. When he had first visited Santa Barbara twenty years ago, they had been rare. On that trip, if he was out in a boat he would be lucky to see a few at sunset flying back to nesting grounds on the islands. Now they were everywhere. Three or four waddled around every day on Stearns Wharf, rolling from side to side with their wings stuck out and their long beaks agape, staring with beady prehistoric eyes at the tourists. Mallon was old enough
now to have noticed that the human program of transforming the world into a poisoned desert sometimes suffered setbacks and delays.

His back and haunches were beginning to feel stiff from sitting, so he reached for his backpack. The movement brought his eyes along the beach so that he noticed the girl standing on the sand staring out at the ocean, gazing just past the next curve of the shore. He knew he should stand up and resume his walk past her, up the beach toward home, but the way she stood, it seemed to him that she could not see him. He supposed that a suntanned, barefoot man wearing khaki shorts and gray T-shirt could easily be lost to the eye among the rocks beneath the cliff. She was clearly not expecting to see anyone here; she might have walked a mile along this stretch of beach without meeting anyone at midmorning on a weekday. There was no nearby place where a person could park a car and easily climb down here.

He savored the feeling of invisibility: it gave him a chance to take an unhurried look at her. She was young. He judged her to be about twenty-five, and then detected an unexpected sense of loss. He was forty-eight, and the estimate placed her in a different generation, on the other side of a wall that made a certain kind of adventure not impossible but unlikely and maybe a bit ridiculous. He considered standing up, but he didn’t want to startle her now—certainly not frighten her—so he watched and waited for her to move on.

She was pretty, with long brown hair, and that added to his discomfort because it made him feel like a voyeur. She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts not so very different from his, and a top of the sort with thin straps like strings to hold it up. She took a step. That made him feel better: this would be over soon. She paused, then leaned her body forward. Her left foot moved ahead just in time to keep her from toppling, then her right took a step to compensate, and she was walking. She kept her head down and her legs moving in a determined stride until she reached the firm margin of tightly packed sand just above the tide line, and then kept going into the water.

The first five steps were easy, the waves foaming around her ankles,
then her shins. He watched her walking in, an act so familiar that he felt her steps in his own body: the first wave hit her thighs and made her progress stop, then pulled her on with its backwash. The next one hit her at the top of her legs, and made her take an involuntary hop because the cold was reaching the tender spots. She leaned a little to the side when the next wave hit her, then straightened, hugged her arms around her chest, and kept walking. She did not dive under and begin to swim as the next wave approached, although that was what he had been sure she was going to do. She simply let it go over her.

Santa Barbara had always been full of triathletes, marathon runners, and long-distance swimmers, and he decided she must be another sample of one these varieties. She would come up in a moment like a dolphin, swim straight out until she was past the breakers and the long Pacific swells rolled under her. Then she would turn north to swim along the coast for a mile or two, slosh back onto the beach, and run. He was perfectly contented with her. He liked the kind that wore plain khaki or something instead of those unappealing spandex outfits. Then he realized he was getting uncomfortable—short of breath—and he stood up quickly.

When she had gone under, he had unconsciously taken a breath and held it. But this was too long. “Pah!” He pushed it out and inhaled deeply, already running across the sand toward the water. He kept his eye on the spot where she had disappeared, leaping over the first two incoming breakers, then diving over the third and crouching to let the fourth surge over him before he pushed off and began to swim. He swam a hard freestyle, his feet kicking up a wake and his arms stabbing furiously into the water and pulling, his head turning to breathe every sixth stroke.

His mind had begun to enumerate the possibilities: maybe she had gotten tangled in a big clump of kelp, panicked, and gulped water. Maybe she’d had some kind of seizure. He reached the spot where he was almost sure she had gone down. He stroked to raise his body high, pointed his toes, and went under, feet first.

His foot hit something, and in a reflex he pulled it back, unbelieving. He realized that he had been sure he was going to find nothing, touch nothing. The odds that he could find an unconscious person out here were minuscule. He came up for air, dived, and swam straight down. The water was dim and cloudy, yet he saw her, not below but beside him. She was hanging about ten feet down, her limbs glowing white in the murk, her hair swirling in the current, radiating out on all sides. He put his left arm around her torso, stroked with his right, and kicked toward the light.

When he broke the surface, she did not move or twitch or join him in the gasp for air. As he shifted his left arm across her chest and began to tug her toward shore, for the first time he let himself think that she might be dead. He struggled to bring her to shallow water, trying to keep her head up but several times finding that he had failed, had taken a stroke with her head under. Each time it made him swim harder, desperate to get them to the beach, where he could do something.

Then his foot hit sand, and he hauled her in more quickly, finding that he moved faster if he held both her arms and dragged her through the shallow water. When he reached the tide line he beached her on the firm, wet sand, her lower legs still in the water but her head, torso, and thighs out. She still had a pair of sneakers on her feet.

Mallon rapidly went through the preparations for cardiopulmonary resuscitation, reassuring himself with a memory of his first instructor in the Air Force: “If he ain’t breathing and his heart ain’t beating, he’s dead. Anything you do is better for him than that.” He bent her head back, opened her mouth, made sure her tongue was visible. He carefully placed the heel of his hand below her sternum and gave the required ten pushes, then pinched her nostrils shut, leaned forward, placed his lips over her mouth and gave her a breath, then sat up and pushed her chest again.

She gasped, a sound like a whistle, coughed, vomited. He rolled her onto her side so she could keep coughing up water without blocking
her airway. “You’re going to be okay,” he said quietly. “That’s right. Cough it up so you can breathe.” He patted her back as he remembered people doing to him when he was choking on something as a child, but a very strong message from the attitude of her body told him that it was not what she wanted.

He said, “Good. You’re going to be just fine.” Then he saw that her eyes were open, and that she was trying to get a look at him, but the sun was in her eyes because he was above her. He forced himself to say something about himself, just to reassure her that he was real, and ordinary, and friendly. “I saw you go under, and I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you.”

She sat up with great effort and stared at him in absolute disbelief, then lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the sand in sorrow.

He stood up, not knowing where to look. Of course. She had not wanted to be saved. She had been trying to die.

N
o
, Mallon thought.
Not this. Not again
. He raised his head to look up at the ragged crest line of the cliffs above the beach, then turned his whole body to stare anxiously up and down the shoreline, searching for the shape of another human being. There was nobody. He looked down again at the girl lying on the sand, and forced himself to think. They were a half mile from any spot where he could climb the cliffs and get to a telephone. Even if there had been a nearby spot, he could not imagine leaving her here long enough to make a call. She might very well wait until he was out of sight and simply walk back into the water. He had to make his heart stop fluttering and concentrate. His chance to save her wasn’t when he had dragged her out: his chance was beginning now.

He waited for several minutes, until she sat up and looked around again. They were both cold, and she was shivering. He got his backpack, opened it, and wrapped his towel around her shoulders. He said, “Are you feeling well enough to walk yet?”

She nodded. “I’m okay now. Thanks for helping me. But you shouldn’t—”

“Good,” he interrupted. “Come on.” He put on his pack, gripped
both her arms firmly, and tugged her to her feet. He kept his tone even and businesslike, trying to hold on to the quickly evaporating authority he had assumed in saving her, the emergency voice. “There’s a set of steps that lead to the road about a half mile this way.”

“I know. That’s the way I came.”

“Is your car up there?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I walked from town.”

He clenched his jaw. He had never before seen any sense in driving somewhere to go for a walk. Now he did, and he could also see that never bringing a telephone with him had been stupid. He didn’t tell her he had no car with him, because he was afraid to upset the fragile hold he still had on her.

He kept walking, moving steadily to get to the stairway. He had a very strong intuition that if he got her off the beach, she would be out of immediate danger and his responsibility would end.

At last they reached the wider stretch of beach, where the cliffs were lower and the steps zigzagged upward to street level. He stood by the first of the wooden railroad ties that had been set into the cliff. Trying to keep his hands from shaking, he took his walking shoes out of his pack, slipped them on, and waited for her to go ahead of him. He knew he had to get her up and away from the ocean, but he also sensed that if he rushed her, she would resist. Finally, she stepped on the first railroad tie, and he quickly moved in behind her. When she stepped to the second, he followed. She climbed slowly, not as though she was physically tired but as though she was reluctant to leave the ocean. She would climb a dozen steps, then turn and look over her shoulder at it with a silent resignation.

When they were at the top, he set off across the grass to the road without hesitating to give her a chance to resist or even think about where he was leading her. They walked silently until they were at the long, curving road that led between two dry hills toward the part of town he wanted to reach.

She said, “You don’t have a car?”

He smiled. “Sure I do. It’s just not where I’d like it to be at the moment. I always walk here.”

“What for?”

“I’m an old guy. I need the exercise.”

“You didn’t have any trouble swimming out there and dragging me out of the ocean,” she said. “You must be okay.”

“You’re not very heavy,” he said, but he allowed himself to feel good about the faint compliment. She was right. He had saved a drowning person’s life. That was not a minor thing. He judged its value by looking at the girl, her small, appealing face wreathed in stringy wet hair, her trim, small body: yes, he noted, even now, in this circumstance, he couldn’t help it. He imagined how he would have felt to see her dead, and made the comparison. No, saving her had not been a negligible accomplishment. If she used her life well, saving her might be the most important thing he had ever done. Certainly this extra chance was the best thing he had ever given anyone.

He had to preserve it by never letting his attention flag, had to be sure that everything he did now was exactly right, because he could feel that it was like a puzzle solved in the dark, with answers that would help her live, and others that would kill her. He knew he needed to keep the means of suicide away from her. He constructed a mental image of the area ahead and designed a course, so they could walk the two miles to town on streets that never came within sight of the ocean. He sensed in himself the human compulsion to say things, but he resisted. There were too many chances to make a mistake, trigger a painful memory, or offend her. He also had an exact destination in mind, and as it drew nearer, he wanted to avoid the charge that he had spoken just to keep her occupied, to hide the most important information from her.