Dead Low Tide (14 page)

But they come down and build their high-shouldered houses with the tiny windows, and thus what should be a good life turns into one long almost unbearable summer in Indiana.

I parked and went up and pushed the bell and looked through the screen into a dark hallway. All the shades were down, of course. Summer in Indiana. All that was missing was the lemonade. A small sagging woman came out of one of the rooms, trotting like a weary little horse.

“Yes, yes?”

“Is Miss Kenney in, please?”

Prim lips tightened. “There’s been so much coming and
going, I wouldn’t know, young man. I’ve given up trying to keep track. You can go on up if you want to and find out. Those stairs are too much for me in this kind of weather. I suppose you’ve been here before, young man.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Go right up the stairs and go back to the end of the hall toward the bathroom, and it’s the door on the left, the last door before you get to the bathroom. And please be quiet. Mr. Grimsbach works nights this week.”

She gave me another look of sharp, birdlike disapproval, and trotted back to her dim warm-damp cave, no doubt to fan herself and rock and think of Indiana.

The stairs were carpeted and they creaked. I went up and walked down the carpeted hall, which also creaked. The bathroom was done in pink and blue. The lid of the john seat was down, and it was covered with some kind of knitted thing like a tea cozy, which matched the oval rug on the linoleum floor.

Her door was closed. I knocked and waited. There was no answer. I called her name softly. No answer. Mr. Grimsbach worked nights. And he snored days. I could hear him, somewhere close at hand. I turned the knob and pushed the door open.

It was done in Grand Rapids colonial maple, with a high bed, a rag rug, a big-chested bureau, a single window, a straight chair, a rocker with needlepoint. It was extremely neat and hotter than homemade sin.

Joy Kenney sat on the straight chair. She sat looking at the wall beyond the bed. She wore brief gray corduroy shorts, a white terry-cloth halter. Her feet were bare. She sat with her knees close together, her hands resting in her lap. I shut the
door and spoke to her. She did not move or turn. I could see the slow lift and fall of her breathing. The room was so hot that her body was shiny with sweat and her hair was damp at the temples. I went over and shook her gently by the shoulder. She did not respond. I looked into her eyes. The pupils were tiny, expressionless.

I SAT ON THE BED
where I was within her line of vision, but she still seemed to be looking beyond me. I spoke her name a half-dozen times. It made me think of the game we used to play when we were kids. Any move or twitch or word or giggle and you lost. You had to be just like a statue. She was playing it well—too damn well. I wondered if she were drugged. It didn’t seem very likely, the erect way she was sitting. An alarm clock made a busy ticking in the room. A distant car horn blasted. Grimsbach snored. And she looked through me.

I stood in front of her and slapped her across the cheek, harder than I had meant to. Her eyes seemed to narrow slightly. The blow had turned her head a bit, so that now she looked more toward the foot of the bed. She did not turn her head back to its original position. Something was nibbling at the back of my mind, an old, old memory. Suddenly it came
back. A little blondie at Syracuse. The other girls in the house where she lived said she’d been acting odd and thoughtful and secretive for weeks. So all at once she moved the rest of the way out of life—moved off into some dark place of negation. And I heard at the infirmary that the doctor who examined her picked up her arm and held it high over her head. When he released it, it remained there in position until he pulled it down again. Life had become, somehow, unbearable for her, so the mind had decided to get the hell out. Catatonic dementia praecox.

I slapped her again and again. My fingers left livid marks on her cheeks. It sickened me. I had to have some way to shock her out of it, some way to bring her back to the world. I wondered if I could shock her into self-awareness through modesty, through shame. I pulled the terry-cloth halter down from her breasts, so that it was around her diaphragm, below her breasts. There was no reaction. None at all. In a way it was more sickening than the act of slapping her. I pulled the halter up awkwardly. This was something for a doctor. It occurred to me that I might be making it worse, that through my actions I might be pushing her farther and farther back into that world where she had retreated from reality.

There were two suitcases in the closet. I went through those carefully and through each drawer in the bureau.

I found the envelope Mary Eleanor had described. I found it almost by accident. It was under the paper lining in the bottom of the bottom drawer, and when I was replacing her clothing in the drawer my fingers brushed against the irregularity. In my haste to see what was in the envelope, I left the drawer open, left her clothing spilled on the floor beside the
drawer. I took the envelope over to the bed. It was the kind with string wound around and around a little fiber button.

I had seen pictures like those before. A friend of mine brought some home from Japan. But the prints hadn’t been very clear. He was quite delighted with them—and I thought at the time that it was a case of arrested development. I guess when I was a high-school sophomore such pictures might have given me delightful shivers and lurid dreams. But at man’s estate you outgrow your pleasure in vicarious sex, even the crazed and twisted and grotesque varieties exemplified in the fourteen glossy black-and-white eight-by-ten prints I laid out on the bed.

There can be beauty in the coupling of man and woman, but only in the hearts and souls of the participants. It is not, one can readily understand, a spectator sport. We are the hairless beasts, and in our spermatic strainings there is, from a spectator standpoint, only that sort of curious interest felt by men with big bellies and tiny minds—the men who attend smokers and compensate thus for their own nocturnal inadequacies.

In nine of the fourteen prints, Mary Eleanor’s face was clear and unmistakable. The camera had been directly above the well-illuminated arena. In those nine her expression was uniformly that of savage and blinded intentness, of spasmed need. In the other five she was less recognizable. The male was a well-constructed animal. And it was clear that his forte was inventiveness rather than tenderness.

I could guess at his expression. It would be one of remoteness and mild contempt. But I could only guess. In every picture a scissored slash came in from the margin at a place where it would not hurt the action, and cut his head out, so that
there was a hole in every picture but one. In that one, his head had been out of range.

They were sick scenes, like the imaginings that sometimes float up out of the stagnant pools in the dark valleys of your mind. They were that ultimate evil which denies and almost refutes the existence of the human soul. They bore that same relation to love that heroin bears to red wine.

I gathered them together and slipped them back into the brown envelope. I was very willing at that moment to resign from the human race. I looked at the still face of Joy Kenney. I left the envelope on the bed and searched again. There seemed to be nothing personal in the room. No letters, no papers, none of the little bits and scraps of life that we seem to collect.

I knew that I would send someone to look after her. I went to the door and looked back at her. It seemed callous to leave her sitting there, even though I doubted whether she was aware of anything around her. I went back and picked her up and put her on the bed. She lay for a moment, and then made the first independent action. She was on her side. She pulled her knees up high, and put her chin down, and brought her doubled fists up close under her chin. I recognized the position then. It is the position of the foetus in the dark warm womb. It is the final negation of life. It is the retreat which seems one step farther away than death, because there is, in it, the implication that life had never existed.

I took the envelope and went out into the hall and closed the door after me. After her room, the hallway seemed cool. The sweat on my body was cool. The backs of my hands prickled. I tiptoed past the gargling rhythms of Mr Grimsbach, and down the creaking Indiana stairs and across the
lemonade porch and back into Florida, out of the world of knitted things, and out of that sense of sweet warm horror that Bradbury seems to know so well.

The envelope lay on the car seat beside me. I wanted to know more about the pictures. I wondered if John Long had found them and taken them, and if they had, for a time, been locked in his office desk. I wondered what it would do to that man to look at such pictures. What would it do to his soul, and his dreams and his appraisal of his marriage?

I thought of Homer Prosser. His dark narrow shop would still be open. Homer has very little interest in human beings. He is concerned only with how best to capture, in a studio print, the look of sea-grape shadows on white sand, or the look of the water in a tide pool. His eyes are lenses, his fingers are acid stained—developing fluid flows in his veins.

I was able to park right in front of his camera shop. Two women were buying film. Prosser’s anemic daughter was waiting on them. She recognized me and for a moment her eyes almost came alive. When I asked for Homer she said he was in the back.

I went back and knocked.

“Who is it?” he asked in his thin voice.

“McClintock, Homer. Busy?”

He opened the door and looked vaguely at me. “Fixing something. What do you want?”

He backed away as I came in. I pulled the door shut. “Homer, I want you to look at some pictures and tell me everything you can about how they were made, and I want you to forget you ever saw them.”

His eyes slid to the envelope. “Prints? It’s hard to tell much from prints. A little. Not much.”

“And forget you saw them?”

“If you say so.”

The thought of a technical problem brought him alive. He took the envelope and went over to a long table and switched on a bright light and took the prints out of the envelope. He looked at them, one by one, as calmly as a grocer inspecting lettuce. He picked two and put them down side by side and put the rest in the envelope.

“Competent,” he said. “Professional, or very good amateur. From the definition of the shadows—here and, see, over here—I’d guess it might be infrared. Illumination would be a very pretty problem. From the shadows there was a light source over here, and one over here, probably. Camera always in the same place. Same focus, same aperture.”

“Infrared?” I asked.

“Take pictures in what seems to be total darkness. Just that the wave length of the light used is out of the range of the human eye. Film can pick it up, though. Very fast film, wide aperture, relatively long exposure. Movement is a little blurred in a couple of these. Used to be pretty rare. Amateurs have been doing it in the last few years. Naturalists. So on.”

“Then they wouldn’t know a picture was being taken?”

“Oh, no. Look to them like a dark room. Brightly lighted, though, as far as the camera is concerned. The photography in these is better than the developing. Sort of a fast careless job there.” He slid the two prints in with the others and, turning in the chair, handed me the envelope. “Sorry, that’s all I can tell you.”

“That’s enough, Homer. What do I owe you?”

He stared uncomprehendingly at me. “I didn’t do anything.”

When I went back out after thanking him, a couple of the town hard boys were leaning against my car, pale-eyed, tensed up, trying to look casual as all hell. I couldn’t remember their names. They had both worked on jobs of ours off and on. They fished commercial a little, went cat hunting in the sloughs in season, took illegal gators when they could find a market.

“How you doin’, lady killer?” the biggest one asked.

“Suicided anybody lately?” the other one asked.

The biggest one was leaning against the car door. He had his arms crossed in such a way that his fists bulged his big brown biceps. I wanted no part of a street brawl and that was what they had in mind. I could smell it.

“You boys want something?” I asked mildly.

“We want to know how come they let you out?”

“Yeah, you must have given old Wargler a lot of your smart talk. Old John Long was a right good friend of mine. And we don’t go for people playing around with other people’s women. Somebody ought to take a fish knife and fix you up so you stay out of trouble.”

You work in the town and so you are a part of the community, and then all of a sudden you’re just as much a stranger as when you first arrived, indistinguishable from any tourist.

“What you got there?” the big one asked, looking at the envelope. “Pardon from the governor? Let me see that.”

He held his hand out. I said, “No. You can’t see what I’ve got here, boys. It’s private business.”

The smaller one moved out a bit, casually, moving slowly, with the very obvious intention of coming around behind me. I moved back onto the sidewalk to keep them both in front of me. It had helped them to have something specific
they wanted. It was better and easier than just the vague idea of embarrassing me, of needling me and hoping something would start up. I couldn’t see any U.S. Cavalry riding down the street with bugles and pennons. And either one of them could break my head.

I said adios to pride and male vanity. I spun around and ran like a rabbit. I ran better than a rabbit. I didn’t waste any time bounding. I received a lot of startled looks, but I ran right on down to Saddler’s Drugs and through the door and to the phones.

I remembered then what I had neglected to do, and the first person I called was Dr. Graman. His nurse got him on the line and when I recognized his precise, slightly girlish voice, I told him about Joy Kenney and gave him her address.

“Did you say McClintock?” he asked.

“Yes, I did.” From the booth I could look out the front door and see my two friends standing on the corner.