Tears Are for Angels (23 page)

    My head broke above the surface and I drew in great gulps of air. I heard her scream. His arms closed around my neck from behind, hard.

    The sweet breath choked out of me. Before I could resist we were underwater again, sinking slowly now, my empty lungs giving me no buoyancy, my heart pounding heavily, and his arms like two boa constrictors around my throat.

    I felt my whole head popping and I tugged at the arms around my throat. They were of steel. Down we sank, farther into the blackness, the pressure heavy on us now, little bubbles tickling about us, and the water silent, unmoving, imprisoning us both.

    I thrashed hard at him, but now his legs squeezed tightly around my waist and his grip seemed to grow stronger. Got me now, I thought, got me good unless I can hold my breath longer. Got to hold my breath…

    Then I fell the just tentative licking of the long waving weeds reaching out for me, reaching for him too. Pure terror filled all of me, terror for something unhuman that waited for us there, yearned for us, would never let us go.

    I jerked frantically, my whole chest bursting now for the want of oxygen, my head feeling a yard wide, my nostrils burning, my feet frozen up under me, as far as possible from the hungry, terrible tentacles reaching for them.

    I felt his grip relax.

    I twisted my body madly. I felt his legs slip away from my waist. My fingers clawed at his arm.

    
I did it
.
I outlasted him
.

    My feet kicked once, twice. I dug at the water with my arm. straining every muscle in me, and felt my body rising in the water, rising, rising, still bursting for air, but rising now, rising forever, and then there was the blessed, the unbearable sweetness of the air on my skin and the deep fire of it entering my parched lungs in great gulps and the fuzzy tiredness inside my head and the popping in my eyes and ears.

    "Harry!"

    I felt a hand grasp my hair and pull me toward the dam and I twisted up my head and her face was right over mine, her eyes wide and her mouth strained in the effort, as she lay flat on her stomach, holding me up by my hair.

    "You can reach the bank! Put out your hand, Harry!"

    I put out my hand, obedient as a child, too tired to think for myself, and felt the rough stone of the dam under me. My weight rode easily in the water then, and I felt her hand let go of my hair, and I clung there, spent.

    I felt her hand on my cheek.

    "You were down there so long, Harry. I thought you'd never come up. It was so black…"

    Thought began to come back into my head, to move cautiously around in my brain like a cat nosing at food, and I nodded wearily.

    "Stewart. Where is he?"

    "He hasn't come up."

    I shook my head. A great weight seemed to be on my shoulders. He hasn't come up, I thought. That means he's still down there. Now, isn't that silly? If he hasn't come up, of course he's…

    … still down there!

    "The weeds," I said. "The weeds got him."

    I hadn't outlasted him after all. Only the weeds had defeated him.

    "But you came up, Harry. You came up!"

    "Give me the knife."

    "The knife?"

    "Got to get him up. Can't let him die now. Give it here."

    "No, Harry, you might-"

    "No time to talk. Give it to me. Got to get him up."

    I felt the haft of the knife slip under my fingers, still clinging to the stone dam. Then her hand was on mine for a moment, soft and strong and smooth.

    "Harry, come back to me."

    I let go of the dam and put a foot against it and pushed myself away from it. The third time, I thought; they say you don't come up after the third time you go down.

    I took several long breaths and then a final one and closed my eyes. I went under in a surface dive, my one arm, its hand holding the knife, pulling me down, the cool, dark waters slipping over me with oily ease.

    I opened my eyes.

    

    

    It's dark down here.

    It's dark and I am afraid.

    But I will not let another man die down here, no matter who he is, no matter how afraid I am, if I can get him out. Because he must want to live too, and I know what it is to want to live. Wanting to kill is nothing beside wanting to live.

    The water is heavy. The water is crushing me.

    And I can't see. I open my eyes and it is as if I had no eyes, only the stinging tells me they are there. If I could only see.

    Down, down, down. Dark. Cold now.

    I feel it. I feel the first touch of it. undulant against me, and then another, and now I am into them, they are all about me, their touch slides over me, and I am swimming into them. Their long, slimy fingers are caressing me, loving me, closing over me.

    My chest burns. My lungs are on fire.

    Something cold. Slick. I can't see but I feel it.

    An arm. I slide my fingers along it and there is a shoulder, the arm straight out from it.

    I am trying to forget the soft waving things, coming at me out of the dark, the deep. I am trying to forget them.

    I can't forget them.

    Now I touch his body and it is free, it is parallel and still in the water, it must be his other arm they have caught. My hand is on it now, sliding down it and… yes. Yes.

    Around his wrist. Wound and enmeshed and bound. The knife.

    Slash. Slash.

    If I could only see, if only my lungs were not bursting in me, my chest on fire, all of me swelling and ballooning and screaming for oxygen.

    Slash. And then upward.

    She got us both out.

    On the soft, crunching sand, crouched there clad only in my shirt, desperate, fear-stricken, she got us out.

    She hauled him first, then me, up on the sand. I could hear her doing it, see her finally, but there were no muscles in me to help.

    But she did it. Somehow.

    I lay there, my legs still in the water, my body jack-knifed over the edge of the dam, and felt her hands, anxious on my body.

    "No. I'm all right. Him. Pump him."

    "Harry…"

    Then for a long time nothing but the lying there, still and peaceful, not having to move, only having to breathe, only having to worship breath. Not even having to think.

    But slowly it all came back.

    I lifted my head. A few feet away, she knelt over him. He was sprawled on the sand, very limp and still. Her body, my shirt clinging wetly to it, straddling him, bent rhythmically down and back, her arms extended to his waist. Her breath went out of her in a little grunt with each pressure stroke, but there were no breaks in her movements.

    I heaved myself farther up on the bank. The wet sand clung like a mat to my naked chest. Her head turned toward me. but the pumping went on.

    I walked over to the car and put on my clothes, the sand gritty inside of them, and went back to her side and sat down.

    "Is he alive?"

    "I don't know. He hasn't moved."

    "He's got to live."

    "Yes."

    "Keep pumping him. Maybe I can help in a little while."

    His head was turned sideways on one flaccid arm, his mouth open, water drooling from it to the sand. She leaned forward on him again and his body gave with her pressure.

    He's got to live, I thought.

    "Did you hear him, Jean? He said he killed Lucy. And I thought I had clone it… all this time. Did you hear him?"

    "I heard him. He almost killed you too."

    Her eyes were naked in relief and slowly passing fear and I reached out and touched her shoulder, leaving my hand there as her body bent to the pumping.

    "He tried to frame it on me. He killed her and he put the gun in my hand and left me there like that."

    "Why, Harry? Why did he kill her?"

    "So he'd be safe. So I couldn't prove he'd been there and so I would go to the chair and wouldn't be able to kill him. So he could hang on to that wife and that store and all that money."

    "And when you fooled them with the suicide note and shooting yourself, he must have known that someday he'd have to kill you, to keep it from ever being found out."

    "Yes. He must have been thinking that all the time. Just like I was. Maybe he even thought I knew he had killed her. Only I went off the track and for a while he thought he wouldn't have to. Then you came along and we forced the whole thing to a head."

    "So all that time he was planning to kill you too."

    "Yes."

    So he is no worse than I am. Or than I was. Because I was lucky. I found out in time. I found out you have to live with yourself too. And I guess he never did.

    I could see she was tiring now. I longed to put my arm around her and hold her, hold her forever.

    "I'll try it a while," I said.

    "It wouldn't work. You need both hands."

    "I hate to see you wear yourself out."

    "It's worth it. Like you said, he's got to live."

    "Yes. So we can turn Brax Jordan loose on him and get him to tell how Lucy died. So the law can make him pay for it. I think he'll talk. After tonight, I think he will."

    She sighed at me again, still bending steadily to the pumping.

    "That wasn't why you pulled him out of there, Harry. It's important, but that wasn't why you went down in that water to get him."

    "Maybe not. I don't know."

    "It was because now you don't want anyone to die."

    I didn't say anything.

    "Well, I don't either. That's why I don't mind doing this."

    I reached for his wrist and tried to find a pulse.

    "I don't know. I don't feel anything."

    "He'll live," she said. "I'll make him."

    And again I knew how implacable she could be, how she could will herself to do anything, anything.

    "What about us?" she said.

    "You haven't done anything. When he hears about tonight, Walt-the Sheriff-will forget what we planned to do. And all they can get me for on the other thing is covering it up, making it look like suicide. I don't think he'll care too much about that, either. Not if he gets the real murderer."

    She looked at the stump of my arm.

    "You've already paid for that, anyway," she said.

    I don't know how long we remained there like that. I don't know how long it was that her small, unrelenting body bent ceaselessly to his, willing life back to him, forcing him to live again, forcing him to return from death to life.

    I don't know how tired she must have been, her arms numb and aching, her back screaming in despair, the muscles of her smooth and tender flesh drawn into open sores of fatigue, and her mind and her proud, undefeatable heat forbidding her to quit.

    I only know that it was a long time, that the moon moved high, that the stars winked on, and that I had all the lime in the world to think, to dream, to know inside of me what lay ahead for us forever.

    And then I heard him cough.

    Without speaking, I stood up. She had not by one movement broken her rhythm. I thought how it was almost like birth, how that too gave life in straining muscles and grinding fatigue and agonizing rhythm. God did not give life lightly. Somebody had to suffer for it.

    Maybe that's one reason why it's so precious.

    "He's alive," I said.

    "Yes. You'd better go call the Sheriff now. I'll be all right. He's weak as a fish, and besides, I've got the gun."

    I bent and kissed the back of her neck.

    "And then I'll come back," I said. "And we'll be together always."

    The moon shone no more brightly than her eyes.

    I walked over to her car and got in and drove into the narrow little road and onto the bigger one and pretty soon I saw the lights of the little filling station from which I would call the Sheriff.

    All of a sudden, I thought about Lucy. If there were any such thing as revenge, she had it now. But that didn't matter, never had mattered. What was important was that she had not betrayed me, had not betrayed anybody, and that now she could rest peacefully, knowing that I knew she had died to save me from hurt and shame and my own violence.

    Lucy, I thought, I'm sorry. That was the only time I ever doubted you. And I'm sorry.

    And somehow I knew too that she would be glad Jean was with me now, and would be with me forever. I believe that's the way she would have wanted it, I thought. I believe she would have wanted Jean to have all that was taken from her.

    And only then I remembered that I had not yet told Jean about the money Brax Jordan held for me.

    I chuckled.

    It will make a nice down payment on a farm, I thought. One like she's always wanted.