Storm Tide (29 page)

“Yes, I do.” She curled into the crook of my arm and fell asleep within seconds.

The alarm rang in what seemed the middle of the night. Crystal ran off to the bathroom. I was still fumbling with the clock when she returned. “We don’t have to get up for another hour.”

“But you’re seeing her today,” Crystal said.

“So what?” The room was cold. A sharp light knifed into the room from the hallway we kept lit for Laramie. I smelled perfume and toothpaste as she crept beneath the sheets. “You want to make love? Now?”

“I want to fuck you dry.”

I struggled to get to the toilet but she pushed my shoulders back. “You have to piss, don’t you?” She squeezed my balls. “You feel like you’re going to burst.” She knew men’s bodies, the pressure of necessity and desire.

“Just stay here,” she said, and began licking me, feathering my cock, lips and tongue, drawing the edge of her teeth across the shaft, giving me pleasure to the point of pain. “I’m going to come,” I said, at which she tugged my balls and swallowed me down the tunnel of her throat. She threw her leg over my head and buried my face in her crotch. Smelling of piss and sex, night sweat and traces of perfume, she ground herself to the beat of a primal tune. Feeling me shudder, she scuttled off and presented her ass. “Shove it in deep,” she said. I fell into her, quivering. I melted. I ran my palms up her thighs, the plane of her back, her nipples, her throat. Her mouth. She bit my fingers and we collapsed, liquid and skin, into the twisted sheets. “Do you want to do it again?” she said.

“Are you crazy?” I was gasping. Breath and strength had left my body. “Do you?”

Her face half in darkness, half light, her voice cool in spite of the sweat that glistened on her breasts and upper lip, she said: “I can’t send you to her with anything left.”

J
OHNNY

    Through his office window Johnny watched Crystal running out to her car in the rain—a bit of thigh showing as the wind lifted her skirt—settling herself in the driver’s seat, fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. He found himself smiling. Women were all the same. As if she wouldn’t have to leave the car in the same pouring rain and get mussed up before anyone saw her. He heard her try the engine, try it again and again until the starter motor screeched and she banged the steering wheel with her fist. As she struggled to open the hood, he ran out with his umbrella, blown inside out by the northeast wind. “Come inside! Come inside now!” he shouted.

Crystal hadn’t heard him and jumped, startled, when he appeared behind her. “It won’t start!”

“Go back inside and we’ll call the garage.”

“They won’t come in a storm like this.”

“They will if I call them. Now get under this umbrella.” She resisted his grip but gave up and followed him inside. “That’s all I need,” he said, “you getting sick and nobody knowing how to work the damned computers.”

“I have to pick up my son.” She shook out her hair.

Johnny was on the phone with the garage. Whatever idiot they’d left in the office had no idea to whom he was speaking. Johnny gave him the address and hoped for the best. “Now sit down next to the radiator and dry off. The office is closed for the day. Relax.”

Crystal seemed uneasy, but no more than he was, he supposed. He hadn’t spent ten minutes alone with her since the day of the interview. He didn’t want to be caught staring, an old man at a pretty girl. But he could enjoy a glimpse of her profile, the little turned-up nose, the lovely shadow of her earrings against her cheek. As her clothing dried, he smelled roses, probably her perfume. “Let’s get you something warming to drink. Would you like that? Would you like a scotch?”

“Oh, no,” she said, as if frightened. “I can’t drink!”

“Tea then. I suppose I can still boil water.” As Johnny lumbered around the staff kitchenette, he saw her watching the window. “We’ll give the tow truck the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. If they don’t show up, I’ll give you a ride.”

“You’re very nice,” she said. “Thank you. Every time it rains, my damned old car gives me trouble.”

“It’s hard, isn’t it? My mother worked all her life,” Johnny said. “But people had their families around in those days, cousins, grandmothers.”

“I get help sometimes,” she said. “I have a roommate.”

A roommate. She was raising a child, for Christ’s sake, and she lived like a stewardess. “And the boy’s father?” He set down the cups and searched for the sugar, asking absently, “He doesn’t live in the area?”

“Wouldn’t much matter if he did,” Crystal said, more amused than angry. “Liam might have been a good father, if he had ever grown up himself.”

“I see that all too often, I have to say.”

“But you would have liked him,” she said. “He was born in Ireland.”

“Where? Do you know?”

“Dublin. He had an Irish music band. They were really good. We traveled all up and down the coast in a Volkswagen bus. Going to a different coffeehouse every night and just getting by, making friends everywhere we stopped.” He heard a wistful, almost songlike quality in her voice, like his own when he was reading to children. “Once in Lake Tahoe we got arrested for camping, and Liam took out his fiddle and got us off.”

“Sounds like a charmer.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half. He sure got everything he wanted from me.”

“But not a baby.”

“How’d you guess? Once Laramie was born, Liam had to choose between his music and his family.”

“But your boyfriend, dear, if you can bear the questions of a nosy old romantic, is there no chance of wedding bells? I see how David looks at you.”

She responded with a self-mocking scowl. “Except I’m not the only one he’s looking at.”

Johnny expected her to turn away again, to bolt, having offered too much of herself. But she sat quietly, staring into her cup. Johnny sighed. “Two paths in a yellow wood. If he’s a good man, he’ll know which one to take.”

“But he is,” she insisted. “She just puts ideas in his head.” Everyone in this office knew who
she
was.

“Dear, I’ve fought Judith Silver for a decade.” He felt Crystal’s attention. “She’s the worst kind of adversary. She fights on moral grounds, tries to persuade you you’re acting out of selfish motives, when she and her husband are the most corrupt couple this town has ever seen. The
drug parties, the sexual display … Gordon Stone has an FBI file as thick as a volume of the encyclopedia. It’s not hard to imagine a good man getting mixed up with her. We men are all weak. A woman like that comes along and tells us what we want to hear.”

“I think it’s the election,” Crystal said. “He didn’t know her before she asked him to run.”

“Didn’t he?” This was interesting. Johnny hadn’t realized they’d actually recruited the boy. He’d thought David one of the pretty young people they were said to share, to pass between them in bed. But this made perfect sense. David Greene. Local hero. Angry young man. Out of town for almost fifteen years. No political history. A clean slate. He had underestimated Gordon. However slow on the uptake and soft-spoken, David was an excellent choice, far better than his own old witch. He was sorry he hadn’t gotten to him first. “You see, they simply have no values, these people. David is a man who was trying to do the right thing by a woman and a child, and they lure him away from his family. I bet you don’t see enough of him, do you?”

“Two nights a week. David says after the election he’ll have more time.”

Johnny saw the tow truck circling the parking lot. He had to work fast. “Not if he wins, believe me. Meetings every night, calls about everything from where a yellow line gets painted down Main Street to who gets to be fire chief. You see, people like Gordon and Judith could never get elected themselves …”

The tow truck sounded its horn. But Crystal didn’t move. “Look at that,” he said. “One beaten up Olds with its hood unlatched, one brand-new Ford, and the idiot can’t tell which needs help. Hold on, dear.” He ran outside to instruct the driver and at the same time take care of the bill.

Back inside, he continued, “Gordon Stone and his people have been waiting for a puppet for years. Once they attach their strings, they own him. Believe me, as much as he might want to, he won’t have time for a family. God bless my dear wife, she would tell you I didn’t.”

“But David doesn’t think he has a chance to win.”

“That’s not what I hear. People like him. The fishermen go for their man, the environmentalists for theirs. It splits the vote. I think he stands a hell of a chance. Come. Get your coat. Looks like our genius out there has your car started. What’s the matter, dear?”

“Nothing. I just … I was hoping … If David heard me say this he’d kill me. I was hoping he’d lose and the thing with her would be over.”

Johnny led her to the door, his hand on her shoulder. “If hope is all we’ve got, we haven’t got much, have we?” He opened the umbrella to
the rain and urged her close. She leaned into him; she didn’t resist. “But if we had something that might help people see things differently, that might change the voter’s mind, then …”

Crystal stopped in the middle of the parking lot. “Like what?”

“I have no idea, dear. You’re the one who knows David. Just something that might tarnish that fresh-faced image for his own damned good. That might save him from falling permanently into the clutches of that woman. If he loses the election, he’ll be of little further interest to that pair.”

The following morning Crystal wrote him out a check, paying for the tow service. If anything, she seemed more reserved with him. Polite, always; efficient and helpful, but perhaps a little ashamed of what she had revealed. He couldn’t blame her, and in truth he was probably lucky. He had crossed the barrier between boss and employee. He was a silly old man. He wouldn’t make a fool of himself again.

At Friday noon, just after the other girls went to lunch, Crystal stepped into his office and closed the door firmly behind her. Approaching his desk, she said softly, “Mr. Lynch. I think I found something you can use.” She reached into her purse.

J
UDITH

    Judith studied the flyer Blossom had put out, simple, vulgar and effective. The headline asked
WHO BEST REPRESENTS THE PEOPLE OF SALTASH
? One photo showed Birdman in a safari jacket peering through binoculars out to sea, gesturing to some unseen audience like a priggish private school science teacher. Ahab clung to the deck of a boat run aground on a sand bar, waving his arms wildly, red-nosed and demented. Judith remembered that little accident. Could happen to anybody, given the way the harbor bottom changed from season to season, but Blossom had come up with a photo. Next, Blossom with her sleeves rolled up collecting trash on Beach Improvement Day. Finally there was David—David and Gordon and herself. They were lying on a bed together, Gordon in his pajamas, his arms around David and her. A bottle of champagne stood on a bed tray as they all toasted Gordon’s last birthday for the camera.

“Well, at least we look as if we’re having a good time,” Judith said mildly, handing the flyer back to David.

“How did they ever get hold of that picture? Natasha took it, right?”

“Of course. But she’s at Cornell, and why would she give a copy to anyone? I suppose it could have been someone in the pharmacy, where the film was left. Or someone in Hyannis, where they send it to be developed. But why are you so agitated?”

Gordon was lying on the couch, eating from the coffee table, perhaps one bite to every ten of theirs. “It can’t hurt you unless you act guilty.”

“I don’t know … It makes me out to be some kind of playboy.”

“David, everybody sees how hard you work at landscaping and nursery.” But in the car afterward with the two of them on their way to a small Shabbat service in the Universalist meeting house, Judith felt she could speak more bluntly. “What upsets you? Are you ashamed to be seen with me—in a photo or in person?”

“Of course not. I’m proud to be with you.”

“We never go out together.”

“Judith, where do I ever go?”

“I assume, wherever young couples with children go. To Little League games. To the movies. Out for pizza at Penia’s.”