When she looked up again, the mulatto was standing on deck, holding on to one of the stays supporting the forward mast, looking out at the boat. He was wearing one of Alec’s blazers, drinking a beer. She guessed he knew it was over and was trying to make as much of the good life as he could while the boat was still his. The sergeant motioned to Mr. Marquart again, and the little boat crept in closer. The cop in the uniform pointed the shotgun at the mulatto and aimed down the barrel, but there was no need for it. He was like a child now.
The fishing boat came about and the mulatto stared at her a moment, then raised the beer and seemed to wave. The sergeant stood up.
“Where’s the other one?” he said.
“Hurt. The missus hit him upside the head with the mast and he gone back downstairs to lay down.”
The sergeant looked at her to see if that was true, and she nodded. “Get him up here,” he said.
“Cain’t,” the mulatto said. “He all pukin’ and moanin’.” He looked at her again and grinned. Like they were together in this.
“John,” the sergeant said to the uniformed cop, “give me the shotgun.”
The mulatto saw that the sergeant had said all he was going to. “Wait a minute now,” he said. “I just thought after what the missus been through and all, she wouldn’t like to be seeing any more of that nigger so soon.”
The sergeant took the shotgun from the uniformed cop.
“All right, boss,” said the mulatto, “all right, whatever you want.”
He moved carefully to the stairway, his body correcting for each pitch of the boat, and started down. When he was out of sight, Mr. Marquart eased the fishing boat next to the
Georgia Peach,
and the sergeant reached up, laid the shotgun carefully across one of the seat cushions, and then, as easily as stepping into a bathtub, he took off his shoes and pulled himself up there too. He was strong and moved easily, but then his foot caught as he brought his leg over the railing, and it hurt him.
She heard them inside, quarreling again. The sergeant left the shotgun where it was on the cushion even when the mulatto appeared again at the top of the stairway, the other one a step behind. She was still below them in the fishing boat, and at the sight of the second Negro, she thought she could smell baby powder and grass.
The uniformed cop went on board next. The soles of his shoes would leave marks on the deck. She thought of Alec, dead in the cabin downstairs, who could not fathom a human being stepping onto a deck with black shoes. Who could not fathom the messes people left for someone else to clean up.
The huge Negro came out of the stairway, sweating, and stumbled to the side, where he sat down, his head falling back against the gunwale. He closed his eyes. The boats were both rocking, and his head appeared and disappeared from her view. She noticed there was dry blood caked from his ear down his neck— the evidence that she’d hurt him.
The mulatto was having a look around. “Things get out of hand, doesn’t they?” he said brightly. “One thing lead to the next.”
He looked into the fishing boat, as if she could verify what he said, and she saw the size of what was ahead. Attorneys, the questions, the trials. Photographers, reporters, insurance agents, business partners, funerals.
The sergeant now held the shotgun in one hand, absently rubbing his knee with the other, while the uniformed cop turned the mulatto around and put handcuffs on his wrists. The other Negro sat up suddenly and vomited down the front of his shirt, then closed his eyes and leaned back against the gunwale. She felt sick too, but held on. The sergeant looked up at the masts, at the rolled sails and sheets and the lines. “You don’t mind my asking,” he said to the mulatto, “what in the world were you two thinking?”
The mulatto began smiling and shaking his head. He was relieved to hear the sergeant talking to him in this way, like another person. He was good at talking with white people; he knew how it was done. “We wasn’t, sir,” he said. “And that’s a fact. We wasn’t thinking this out at all.”
The uniformed cop went downstairs, and his absence seemed to make the mulatto nervous. “No sir,” he said, “truly I don’t know how something like this ever come to pass. Truly I don’t.”
The sergeant didn’t reply to that; he’d turned ice-cold the moment the mulatto began sidling up. Even considering where they were, she was surprised at the suddenness of his change in mood. She was good at reading men and hadn’t seen anything like that coming.
“Excuse me, sir? These cuffs is pretty tight.”
The uniformed cop came back up, gagging, and went right to the huge Negro. Without a word, he took a blackjack out of his pocket and hit him half a dozen times across the side of his head. There was a deep, solid noise each time the jack landed.
The uniformed cop set his feet to swing the jack again, but the sergeant stopped him. “John,” he said, “it’s a waste of time.”
Something in the words scared the mulatto. She thought of the way he was in the cabin earlier, the things he had said, how good he had been at scaring her.
“No, sir,” he said. “We got time to work this out, sir. Plenty of time . . .”
The sergeant turned back to the fishing boat and looked again at her. The uniformed cop grabbed one of the huge Negro’s hands and tried to put handcuffs on him too, but his wrists were too big. Then the Negro moved his head to the side and fresh blood dripped from his ear.
“I don’t see nothing; I don’t hear nothing,” Mr. Marquart said. “Whatever happens here, I look the other way.”
The sergeant nodded, as if Mr. Marquart was important in this, as if he mattered. “It’s safe now,” he said to her.
He waited; they all waited, and behind him, the huge Negro’s face appeared and disappeared with the motion of the boats, and the mulatto stood with his shoulders at a strange angle to accommodate the handcuffs.
“Excuse me, sir,” the mulatto said again. “I seemed to lost the feelings in my hands.”
The sergeant gave no indication that he’d heard him. She was unsure of herself now, uncertain of what she wanted. “Do you need me to identify them?” she said.
“No,” he said, and smiled at that too. “It’s them.”
She stood up and made her way to the edge of the fishing boat. The sergeant leaned over the railing and helped her up. He was strong and solid. The first thing she saw when she’d gotten her feet on deck was the big Negro, reclined against the gunwale. His shirt was wet in front and it clung to his skin.
She was still holding on to the policeman, and the smell came up to her out of the stairwell. She looked away, quietly panicked, realizing that it wasn’t over. Thinking it might be endless.
“They shot the Mexican in the head,” said the cop who had been downstairs. “The second one’s back here, and it’s a mess.” He seemed to remember her then, and pulled himself up. “Sorry,” he said.
The big one opened his eyes. They were bulbous and wet. He looked directly at her a moment, then up at the masts, and seemed puzzled to find himself out on the water in a seventy-two-foot sailboat on Sunday morning. She realized it was a mistake, asking to come with them back out here. She turned to him, the sergeant. She had her hand on his forearm.
“Some other things happened,” she said quietly.
He held her up.
“Sir?” said the mulatto, “could I please have a word with you, sir? They’s often situations in life that ain’t quite the way they seem.” He was begging now, and she noticed again that he was wearing Alec’s blazer. “What the missus is trying to tell you is that they is some of this she don’t want to come out.”
The sergeant turned and spoke in that calm way to the other policeman. “John,” he said, “maybe you ought to go back to the marina now and take Mr. Marquart’s statement.”
The uniformed cop turned and looked at him a moment, making sure he understood, then shrugged and climbed back over the side of the sailboat and sat down with Mr. Marquart, who pull-started the motor. The sergeant thanked Mr. Marquart for his time and cooperation, and told him to send the county a bill for the gas. Then he told the other policeman to call the Coast Guard for a tow.
“You sure you don’t need some help with this?” the uniformed cop said. “I don’t mind.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“Remember that big one’s not cuffed.”
“I remember.”
The sergeant nodded at Mr. Marquart, and the old man adjusted the throttle and dropped the motor into gear and started back across the water.
“Now we can talk,” said the mulatto, as if this were a new start. But he knew better.
The big Negro had been staring at the sergeant for the last few minutes and now he spoke. “I know you, man,” he said.
The sergeant looked up, nothing unpleasant in it, the first time he’d acknowledged he was there.
The big Negro said, “Out at Brookline.” He turned to the mulatto and said, “Man, this here’s the cat come in wanted to pick his own caddy.”
The mulatto nodded at that, but it didn’t make him happy.
“You said you want your own caddy,” the huge one said, and he chuckled. “You want Train.”
“Arthur,” said the mulatto, “shut the fuck up. I’m trying to talk to these people about how this all happen.”
“Man, talking ain’t gone help,” Arthur said. “You can’t see that? It’s beyond the talking stage.” Then he leaned back again into the gunwale and closed his eyes.
A moment passed, and then the sergeant sighed and picked up the shotgun. He broke the breach to check the load, then closed it again. Arthur’s eyes opened at the sound. He began to sit up, and the shot tore away his shoulder and the side of his neck. He was strangely still for a moment. A pink mist floated out behind him, and then gravity took his head sideways and down, in the direction of the missing part of his neck. There were tiny noises then as the bits and specks fell into the water.
“Wait a minute,” the mulatto said. “Wait a minute here. We had a misunderstanding, sir. All this situation need to be sorted out. . . .”
The sergeant nodded again, as if this were, in fact, something they would sort out, as if this were all ordinary Sunday-morning sailboat business, and then he turned himself a little and the shotgun turned with him.
Time was confused. She sat looking at the huge body, still lost in that instant when the noise deafened her and the air turned pink over the water. She thought of her husband struggling on the floor, of the way he had held it off, and how this Negro had gone so easily away.
The mulatto was right. There had been a misunderstanding. She was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She lived in Beverly Hills, California, and made a point of using her NAACP membership card for identification every place she wrote a check. She and Alec had gone ahead, for pity sake, and hosted the fund-raiser for the convicted Negroes in a neighbor’s yard two hours after Howard Hughes flew his airplane into her house.
Nothing she’d done for them mattered, though. She saw that. When the wires actually touched, good intentions and bad intentions were all the same.
“Sir, I ain’t tried to escape here. I ain’t tried nothing. . . .” He looked at her, looking for help.
