Revolution Number 9 (7 page)

“Don’t worry,” Mr. G said. “She’s in no danger. Except psychically, of course—and that’s your doing. It’s a side issue, but did you ever think what in the world she’s going to tell the child?”

Charlie got to his feet, swayed. Maybe if he could stop swaying for a few seconds he could kick Svenson’s head off. He was still trying to do that when a question arose in his mind: how did they know that Emily was pregnant?

Mr. G seemed to be following his thoughts. “Naturally we’ve seen the pregnancy test report. And the amnio results.
Not so long ago, that kind of information-gathering was a distasteful business—break-ins, burglary paraphernalia, nocturnal excursions, the whole grubby scenario. Now it can all be done during office hours by a clerk in front of a PC. It’s a girl, by the way, Mr. Wrightman. I might as well tell you now, since it isn’t likely you’ll be seeing your daughter for some time.”

Charlie dove at Mr. G, got his hands around the scrawny neck. Mr. G fell against the console, Charlie on top of him. Mr. G’s skin felt hot. He struggled furiously but not from fear; Charlie saw no fear at all in his eyes. Then something massive collided with the back of Charlie’s head, turning everything fleetingly red, subsequently black.

· · ·

“It’s an interesting problem,” Mr. G was saying. “How to explain his behavior. Twenty years of quiet, solitary existence, a life structured—realistically—with nothing to lose. Even penitential, or is that going too far? Then suddenly all this … matrimony. What made him think he was safe?”

Charlie opened his eyes. He saw the moon, sliding down the black dome of the sky now; still night. He smelled vomit, saw the white of Svenson’s high-top pumps, not far from his head. Svenson squatted down, shone a pencil flash into his eyes.

“There’s no statute of limitations for what you did,” Svenson said. “No safety.”

Charlie squirmed away from the light. He hadn’t thought about what he’d done in a long time, not consciously. Now images stirred in his mind, fragments from a day of rage, a night of waiting, a morning that came too soon. Did it all add up to a horrible accident? Charlie had tried to persuade himself of that in the past, never successfully. He didn’t try to persuade the men on the cigarette boat.

“Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got plenty to lose,” Mr. G said. Charlie turned to the stern. Mr. G had Charlie’s carton of orange juice in his hand. He opened it, tipped it up to his mouth. The tendons in his neck rose like pop-up illustrations in a children’s anatomy book. He licked his lips. “Poor timing on your part.”

“Is that the home-style?” Svenson asked.

“Home-style?” said Mr. G.

“With the pulp.”

Mr. G squinted at the label. “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“A big one, I hope,” said Svenson. “Dad’s outfit just bought five percent of Tropicana.”

Charlie sat up on the deck. Poor timing, he thought. It was true, now and before. He pictured the wires coiling from the back of Bombo Levine’s cheap alarm clock, the one with the plain black hands and the words “Big Ben” on the face. The appearance of that image in his mind was followed by the twisting feeling inside, a sensation that awoke the pain Svenson’s rifle butt had caused and then was swallowed up by it. He turned his head and looked back, back through the cut toward Cosset Pond. What had made him dream he could be safe, safe enough for Emily? A cold wave in the face, a monster in his trap, snowflakes on her eyelashes: the stuff of dreams. It was all over. He took a deep breath, blew it out.

“Relieved?” said Mr. G. “It’s often like that.”

“Fuck you,” Charlie said, but there wasn’t much force behind his curse. He couldn’t deny a sense of rough justice being served. If it had happened before Emily he might not have cared so much.

“Did you hear what he said to you, Mr. G?” said Svenson.

“He’s just exercising his First Amendment rights,” Mr. G replied.

“So how about me exercising my First Amendment right to kick him in the balls?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, will it, Mr. Wrightman?”

Charlie felt their eyes on him. He put his hands on the rail, got his legs under him, pulled himself erect. The movement awoke a pounding in his head. He took a few steps and sat heavily on the padded bench, not far from Mr. G. “I’d like to talk to her before we go,” he said. “That’s all.”

Svenson and Mr. G looked at each other and some unspoken communication passed between them. Mr. G turned to Charlie. “Go?” he said.

“Wherever you’re taking me.” His mind screened a quick panning shot of his future: holding cell, courtroom, prison.

There was a silence. Charlie was conscious of the paleness of Mr. G’s face, the dryness of his lips, the purple smudges under his eyes. He glanced to the east and saw the faint luminescence of tomorrow on the horizon. “Where you go is up to you,” Mr. G told him. “More or less.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we’ve got a surprise for you, you lucky son of a bitch,” Svenson said. “We’re going to cut you a deal.”

“A deal?”

Mr. G’s teeth appeared for a moment. It might have been a smile. “Puzzled, aren’t you? A deal means an exchange, and what have you got that we want?”

Svenson said, “The surprise is we don’t want you.”

“We’ll
take
you,” Mr. G said.

“But only if we have to,” Svenson added.

“After all, you deserve it,” said Mr. G, “if you want to think in those terms.”

“But we don’t think in those terms,” Svenson said, “and we don’t really want you.”

There was a pause. The eastern sky was lightening now, as though something had sliced through the black and photons were pouring in. Dawn reddened the hollows of Mr. G’s cheeks and illuminated the shades of purple under his eyes. “We want Rebecca,” he said.

“Rebecca?” Charlie said.

“Correct,” Mr. G replied. “Give me Rebecca and you go free. I mean scot-free. No one will ever know. You can keep your wife, your daughter, your quaint little house, your quaint little job, your identity. You can live out the life of Charlie Ochs, in toto—lobsterman, husband, father. That’s alternative one. Alternative two is spending the rest of your life, or most of it, in a federal penitentiary. It’s not very complicated.”

“Why Rebecca,” Charlie said, “and not me?”

“Orders,” Mr. G replied. Svenson turned and gave him an odd look.

“Whose orders?”

Mr. G caught the look in Svenson’s eyes. Svenson changed their expression. Mr. G turned to Charlie and said, “They never come from below.”

“I have no idea where she is,” Charlie said. “I haven’t seen her in twenty-two years, not since …”

“The big bang?” Svenson said. Under the brightening sky, he looked fresh and cheerful, overfull of life force. Charlie wanted to empty him of some of it. He was trying to think of a way when Mr. G said, “Have you heard from her?”

“No.”

“Or of her?”

“No.”

“What about Malik?”

“Nothing.”

“Was that the plan?”

“There was no plan,” Charlie said. “It just happened.”

“Sure,” said Svenson.

“There was no plan,” Charlie repeated, raising his voice. That made his head hurt more. Svenson shifted the rifle in his lap.

“Then you’ll simply have to find her,” Mr. G said. “Set a fugitive to catch a fugitive.”

“If you’re so good at gathering information why can’t you find her?”

“I’ve tried,” Mr. G said. “My guess is you’ll enjoy a smoother entrée into her circle. The long-lost comrade coming in from the cold. That shouldn’t be a difficult role to play.”

The answer, the first and instant answer that sounded inside Charlie’s core, was no. “You want me to betray Rebecca, is that it?”

“I told you,” said Svenson to Mr. G. “These sixties types just never grew up.”

“I’m not a sixties type,” said Charlie.

“Then what are you?” asked Mr. G.

Charlie, caught in a pincer movement between surrounding generations, didn’t answer.

Mr. G leaned toward him. The expression in his eyes was complex—intimate, desperate, beyond Charlie’s understanding. He spoke softly. “It’s not a question of betrayal. It’s a
question of who you want to be—Blake Wrightman with all his baggage, or Charlie Ochs with all his future.”

“He’ll take the past, every time,” Svenson said. “They’re all living in the past, with their touchie-feelie bullshit and their Beatles records.”

“Shut up,” said Mr. G.

“Sorry.”

“Go away.”

Svenson moved up to the bow and stared out to sea.

Charlie said: “What if I can’t find her?”

“You lose.”

“What if she’s dead?”

“Dead?” said Mr. G, as though it was a possibility he hadn’t considered. “Dead, and you can prove she’s dead?” He thought. “That’ll be good enough.”

“Meaning?”

“You win.”

Svenson turned toward them. “I think we’ve got a deal,” he said with surprise. “At least he’s agonizing about it.”

“Have we got a deal, Charlie?” said Mr. G.

I hope to God she’s dead
, Charlie thought.
If not, at least I can play for time. Time might change things
, he told himself, and almost believed it.

“Do we?”

Charlie answered. He didn’t say “I’ve got no choice” or “You’ve got me in a corner” or “What else can I do?”

He said: “Yes.”

· · ·

The red curve of the sun came edging over the horizon. The cigarette roared away toward the south. There was plenty of light now, more than enough for Charlie to see that the cigarette was without name or number. He switched on his engine and rode
Straight Arrow
home.

Charlie tied up at his dock, then stripped off his clothes and jumped in the pond. The salt water stung the wound on the back of his head. He scrubbed off the vomit and the blood and went up to the house. It was quiet. Charlie opened the door. He dropped his clothes in the washer and went upstairs.

Emily was still sleeping, her head in the crook of her arm, her hip jutting up under the covers. Charlie gazed down at her for a moment, then went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth. The face in the mirror didn’t look nearly as tired, beaten, changed, as it should have. He was about to turn on the shower when she called.

“Charlie?”

He stepped out of the bathroom. Emily lay on her back now, wisps of hair in her eyes, her face a little flushed. She smiled at him. Charlie almost had to look away.

“You’re up early,” she said. “Thinking of hightailing it? With me standing at the altar?”

Charlie made himself laugh.

Emily stretched out her arms to him. “I had the most wonderful dream,” she said. He went closer to her, as if drawn by irresistible gravity. Her arms closed around him. “My big oceangoing man,” she said.

“Oceangoing?”

“You smell like the sea,” Emily replied. “I love it.”

H
er wedding day: a day, Emily told herself, to savor every moment. Not just because she was old-fashioned: in truth, she wasn’t really all that old-fashioned. Marriage would be a rock in her life, a fortress, but it would not be everything. She would never give up her work, her independence, her sense of possibility. Not that Charlie would ever want her to.

Charlie. Just when she had started to fear that the laws of probability governing the random movements of male and female populations were not going to let her course intersect with that of the man for her, along had come Charlie, living
right down the street. Charlie was special. Solid and reliable, yes—and she might have settled for that alone in five years or so—nothing was more important to her. But he was smart too, and funny, and strong, and musical. All that, and he smelled like the sea as well. And like the sea, he had things going on down deep that fascinated her. To study the sea, she had her instruments, her computer models, her flair for mathematics. To study the depths of Charlie, she had to catch a look in his eye from time to time, or a strange chorus on that silver saxophone. So it was a day to savor, not just because of the wedding, but because of who he was. She was a lucky girl.

But everything went by too fast, and Emily was left with a memory tape of fragments, like a video shot by a bundle of nerves and edited by someone who didn’t know the story. Fragments: the shaving nick on the chin of the nondenominational minister that opened every time he dabbed it with his black sleeve; the baby’s flutterings inside her, first when Charlie slipped the gold band on her finger, later when her parents got in the taxi; the tears in her mother’s eyes, through the window, as it pulled away.

Then she and Charlie were back in the living room of the little house, their house, packing up their new camping equipment. They were going away for a few days of hiking on Long Trail.

“Charlie, these sleeping bags are supposed to zip together.”

“Like that?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem big enough.” Emily climbed into the zipped-together bags. “You’d better come in,” she said.

“Now?” Charlie said. One of those strange looks surfaced in his eyes.

“For a test. We don’t want to end up like Scott of the Antarctic.”

“Were double sleeping bags his problem?” Charlie said. The strange look—what was it? anxiety? sadness?—vanished from his eyes. He wriggled into the bag. “Seems big enough.”

“Big enough for this kind of activity?”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t? Are you going to go virginal on me now, Charlie? That would be false advertising.” Charlie said nothing. Emily
undid his belt, reached inside. “Nope,” she said after a few moments, “it’s all verifiable.”

Charlie laughed, and Emily thought,
It’s all true, it really is
. She knew a lot of single women, other scientists and lab workers, who had just about given up on men and paid the same obsessive attention to their jobs that sitcom moms paid to their families in the fifties. Now she wasn’t going to be one of them. Ahead lay a life balanced and full. She could almost see it.

There was a knock at the door.

Emily felt her husband’s erection soften in her hand. She whispered in his ear, “Let’s not answer.”

Charlie’s face was inches from hers. How alert his eyes were! She loved that about him. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it.