Pressure Drop (29 page)

“Did you see a real fire?” Matthias asked.

“I sees it.”

“What do you mean? Now? You see it now?”

“Every night.”

“Goddamn it,” said Matthias, and before he knew it he had taken Nottage by the shoulders and shaken him. Nottage was a big man, but he shook. “Was this a real fire or a fire in your mind?”

Nottage didn't speak; he waited for the blow to fall. Matthias dropped his hands. “Shit, Nottage,” he said. “Let's go home.”

But Nottage didn't move. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and said: “Real fire.”

The rain fell heavily now, but Matthias hardly felt it. “When?” he asked.

“In the night.”

“Every night?”

Nottage shook his head.

“What night?”

“In the Duke's time.”

“Did you see it?”

He nodded.

“Where from?”

“The Bluff.”

“What happened?”

“The sea got on fire. Then it be black.”

“Do you mean a boat? Was there some boat on fire out there?”

Nottage shook his head.

“Did wreckage wash up?”

Nottage shook his head again.

“Did anyone else see it?”

“See what?”

“This fire.”

“God.”

“God?”

“The Lord He see. Send down a warning to Nottage.”

“What warning?”

“Sea on fire.”

“But why would God warn you? What did you do?”

Nottage hung his head and didn't reply.

Rain beat down, soaking them to the skin. Nottage kept his head down. The rain saturated his white curly hair and ran down his wrinkled brow. Then, without warning, he vomited. He didn't bend forward, he didn't move away, he simply vomited, and looked at Matthias like a sick and helpless child. Matthias put his hand on Nottage's shoulder. It went rigid again. Matthias took it away. “Let's go,” he said.

They walked back into Blufftown. The rain cleaned Nottage's body. As they came to the Happy Times Bar, he slowed down, now like the territorial creature returning to home base.

“Come on,” Matthias said. “Have something to eat.”

But Nottage, without another look or another word, went inside. The chicken was on the bar now, headless and plucked. The two glasses of rum were still there too. Nottage downed them both. Matthias turned and headed for the dock at Zombie Bay.

The rain began falling more lightly, then not at all. Water ran down the stony roadside gullies, toward the sea. Matthias passed a boy rolling a hoop with a stick, a woman staring out the window of a concrete-block house that had been half-finished for as long as he had been at Zombie Bay, and a pregnant girl sitting in a doorway, looking at the pictures in a worn copy of
Mademoiselle
.

As Matthias came to the beach,
So What
was gliding into its slip. Brock tied up. A guest who might have been in shape long ago put down his beer and tried to help with the unloading. A tank fell in the water. Moxie, anticipating, plucked it out before the man finished saying, “Oops.” A woman in a pink wet suit said: “Wrasse—is that spelled like ‘Rastafarian'?”

“Aks Krio,” Moxie told her.

“Is he the scary-looking one?”

Moxie busied himself with the equipment.

Matthias climbed on the deck and checked the fuel level.

“Going out?” Brock asked, heaving a tank on each shoulder.

“Yeah.”

“It's lousy out there today,” Brock said. “Water's all stirred up.”

Matthias cranked the engines.

“Want me to come along?” Brock called out over the noise.

Matthias shook his head and cast off. He backed
So What
out of the slip, swung the bow around and hit the throttles. Arms folded across his chest, Brock watched him go.

So What
cut across the chop on Zombie Bay, rounded the Angel Fingers and surged into open water. Big pointy-headed waves rolled in endless formations from the west. They bounced the little boat up and down, and hurled their torn-off tops at Matthias, soaking him. Seawater did what the rain had not: it awakened something in him—hope, purpose. And the speed of the boat and the roar of the engines gave birth to possibility. He had a week to file his appeal. He didn't have the money to pay a lawyer, but perhaps a lawyer could be found who would handle the case if the chance of winning was 100 percent, with a countersuit in the future. For the first time since he walked out of Dicky Dumaurier's office, he sensed that it could be done. The two heads of Two-Head Cay appeared on the horizon. Matthias aimed the bow of
So What
at the blank space between them.

He skimmed over the top of the Tongue of the Ocean. Details appeared on Two-Head Cay, rapidly, like brush strokes on the canvas of a landscape-painting instructor on a half-hour TV show: two rocky bluffs, green and gray; a crescent beach between them, bracketed by royal palms and topped by wispy casurinas; and signs of man—a Whaler tied to a long wooden pier and glimpses of a large white façade behind the trees.

All at once, the sea changed from slate-gray to greenish-brown; the waves lost their aggression. He had reached the other side of the chasm.

Matthias pulled back the throttles and coasted toward the pier. The shield of noise fell away. He remembered that the sea had deluded him with feelings of power and possibility in the past, starting with the ride into the beach at the foot of the Sierra Maestra.

He was still thinking about that when Gene Albury came on the pier with a shotgun in his hand, barrel pointed down. There was a woman beside him, gray-haired and leather-skinned: Mrs. Albury. She was holding something. When Matthias drew nearer, he saw it was a Cabbage Patch Kid.

27

Private, said a sign posted at the end of the pier at Two-Head Cay.
NO FUEL
,
WATER
,
FOOD OR PROVISIONS AVAILABLE
.
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING
.

Matthias cut the engines and drifted in. He wound a few figure eights around a cleat at the end of the pier, tied off the line with a half-hitch and hopped up on the sun-bleached boards. Gene Albury and his wife hadn't moved. They watched him from the other end of the pier. Matthias had met them before, once at a fueling stopover in Chub Cay, once at the Conchtown regatta, where Albury raced his cigarette boat, but he didn't see any recognition in their eyes. He explained who he was.

“I know who you are,” Albury said. He spoke softly, his speech slightly musical, slightly drawling, slightly burring: the white Bahamian accent, inherited from his United Empire Loyalist forebears. The physical type too had been preserved: Gene Albury was short, trim, pale-eyed. Mrs. Albury closely resembled him. Her skin, like his, had been roughened by a lifetime under the sun; her hair, like his, was gray, dried-out, wispy. They could have passed for siblings and probably were cousins of some sort, thought Matthias: the gene pool was small, and inhabitants of the old white Bahamian settlements on cays like Spanish Wells, Harbour Island and Man o' War seldom married outside it.

“I'd like to talk to you, Mr. Albury,” Matthias said.

“What about?” asked Albury.

“Dr. Standish.”

The woman shook her head, a movement so fleeting it was almost imperceptible. Albury was looking at Matthias, but he must have noticed it because he said: “Go on up, Betty. I'll not be long.”

Mrs. Albury turned to her husband. They exchanged a glance that meant nothing to Matthias. Mrs. Albury walked away, dropping the doll in a trash barrel at the foot of the pier. Gene Albury stayed where he was. “I'm listening,” he said. A man with a twelve gauge in his hands could take that risk.

“I'm trying to learn the circumstances of Dr. Standish's death,” Matthias told him. “Hew Aikenfield said you could help me.”

“I had no use for Hew Aikenfield.”

“You've heard the news.”

Albury licked his lips. “I heard.”

“He said you knew Dr. Standish.”

Albury nodded.

“He told me Standish drowned in the blue hole behind my place.”

“It was not your place then,” Albury replied in his soft voice.

“That changes everything.”

Albury's brow furrowed. “What's that?”

“You're absolutely right, Mr. Albury. I suppose it belonged to Señor Perez in those days.”

“No, sir,” Albury said. “This was before the spic. There was nothing there, belonging to nobody.”

“What year are you talking about, exactly?”

“I couldn't say,” Albury answered, taking no time to think about it.

“But you can say it was before Señor Perez built the club.”

“I told you that already.”

“Where were you when it happened, Mr. Albury?”

“When what happened?”

“When Dr. Standish drowned in the blue hole. He did drown in the blue hole, didn't he?”

Albury squinted at him. “You the one with the bad air, right?”

“That was never proven. Not to my satisfaction.”

Albury ignored him. “The one that got Happy Standish hurt. And now you're coming here to me that knew him from a boy and asking questions.”

“I'm asking for your help, Mr. Albury. I take it you liked Happy Standish. Supposing what happened to him wasn't an accident. Wouldn't you want to find out what went on?”

Albury squinted a little more; his eyes narrowed to razor-edges of blue. “What are you getting at?”

The question forced him to put it into words: he couldn't believe that Hiram Standish's drowning in the blue hole and the near drowning of his son on the Andros drop-off was a coincidence. But Matthias didn't utter the words aloud. He had no facts, no explanatory theory, and no liking for the way Albury had spoken of Hew or of Cesarito's father. So he just said, “I'm not getting at anything specific. I'm just trying to find out about Dr. Standish's death.”

Albury's index finger stroked the walnut stock of his twelve gauge. It was a fine old Parker side-by-side; Stepdaddy Number Two had liquidated entire flocks of ducks and geese with one just like it. “I can't help you on that, sir,” Albury said.

“Weren't you around at the time?”

Albury's finger kept rubbing the gun. “I said I can't help you.”

“What about Mrs. Albury?”

“Mrs. Albury?” The gun barrel came up a little, as if on its own. Albury pointed it back down.

“Maybe she remembers.”

“No,” said Albury. “She don't.”

Matthias stood on the pier, silent. He saw the blue slits of Albury's eyes, heard waves slapping the pilings, smelled the sea, but could think of nothing useful to say to Gene Albury. Then he saw Albury's eyes focus on something in the distance. He turned.

A boat was approaching from the northwest. It was moving very fast, throwing up a rooster tail as tall as a waterspout. The boat grew, pushing forward a wave of engine noise, taking on shape and color: Albury's red and black cigarette. Matthias glanced at Albury. He was chewing his lip.

The driver came in over the reef, swung the boat in a wide crescent, cut the engines and glided toward the side of the pier, bow facing the sea. The cigarette stopped dead, half a foot from the pilings and perfectly parallel to the pier: a neat maneuver. The driver, who wore goggles, a red jumpsuit and a red helmet, tossed a line to Albury and stepped lightly onto the pier.

“Visitors, Mr. Albury?” she said, removing the helmet and the goggles. She shook out her long, silvery hair.

It was beautiful hair, thick and almost glowing; it destabilized the equation between old and gray. The woman's age was impossible to guess: she had clear, pale, unlined skin, delicate bones, and the body under the jumpsuit seemed trim. Only her blue eyes, deep-set and watchful, showed that she was no longer thirty-five; she might have been twice that, Matthias thought, as she turned to him, and he caught the full force of her look.

“The fellow from Zombie Bay,” Albury explained.

The woman studied him for a moment more, then said: “Mr. Matthias, isn't it?”

“That's right,” Matthias said. “Have we met?”

The woman smiled, but not in a friendly way: a smile at the least ironical, at most full of scorn. “Only through legal representatives,” the woman replied. “I am Inge Standish,” she said, and added: “Happy's—Hiram Junior's mother.”

Matthias thought of saying he was sorry. But that might have implied guilt, and he didn't feel guilty. So he said nothing.

Inge Standish's deep-set eyes watched his face, as though observing this thought process. “What is it you want, Mr. Matthias?” she asked.

Before Matthias could reply, Albury said, “He's asking questions.”

“What questions, Mr. Matthias?”

“I've recently learned that your husband drowned on what is now my property. I'd like to know the circumstances.”

That brought the smile again: complex and unsettling, like a cruel and elaborately designed assault weapon from an earlier age. “How morbid,” said Inge Standish. “Do you have some special interest in our little family tragedies?”

“It's not like that, Mrs. Standish. I'm trying to piece things together. There's a lot I still don't understand about your son's accident.”

“I thought the court was rather clear on that subject,” Inge Standish said.

“Hitler was clear,” Matthias responded, to his own surprise: he didn't like when people used Hitler as a debating tool, but it was too late to stop. “That didn't make him right.”

He waited for some sign of anger, but none came. Inge Standish looked puzzled instead. “Hitler?” she said.

“For example,” Matthias said.

“Oh, of course,” said Inge Standish. “Touché.” She unzipped a pocket in her jumpsuit, took out three or four rings and placed them one by one on her fingers: diamonds, rubies and sapphires, mounted in settings too big for practical seamanship. “But I still fail to see how my husband's death concerns you. It was so long ago, Mr. Matthias. Perhaps you weren't even born then.”