“I was there,” she said, and then wished that she hadn’t. She hadn’t decided about him yet. He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, then changed his mind.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Alec smoked. . . .”
He said, “I was thinking maybe I’d stop, see if I miss it.”
He was staring at her in a way that kept her wondering about how she looked. If she at least looked clean. Above them, the workers hammered the lattice. Then the sound of an electric saw. “I hope this isn’t anything that has to be done today,” she said. “I’m not up to much right now.”
He shook his head. “I just wanted to come by for a minute, see how you were doing.” She looked at him, waiting for him to say what he wanted. “I would have been around sooner, but I had some business out of town.”
She had another drink of the beer and began to feel better. “Is this where we get our stories straight?” she said.
He sat still, studying her, and then he smiled and said, “Let’s talk about it another time.” She noticed again the way he smiled. His face moved, but nothing happened; it wasn’t unlike watching someone stutter.
“Does it matter? Is something going to change?”
“Let’s wait. You’ve been through an ordeal.”
The word caught her by surprise and she looked away, biting her cheek, but it was already too late. It began with a few bubbles, floating up to the surface, and then more, and then it just poured over the sides, and then she was howling, making more noise than the carpenters. She tried to stop, and couldn’t, and then she didn’t care. She brayed. Her eyes teared and her body cinched up in all the places she was bruised, and still she couldn’t stop. She fought for air like a squalling baby. There was spit on her lips, and she wiped at her mouth with her sleeve, afraid the cuts had cracked open and were beginning to bleed. Tears blurred her vision, and he sat still, watching. She hugged herself and rocked and finally managed to speak: “Excuse me. . . . Sometimes, I don’t know why, I just completely lose touch.” She took a deep breath and then heard herself say, “The whole shooting match was such an
ordeal.
Although it wasn’t
much
of a shooting match, of course.”
It happened again, and he waited until she ran down.
The thought occurred to her that he might be dangerous. She didn’t think she cared. She got up, wiping her eyes, and went to the refrigerator for more beer. “Can I offer you a tranquilizer? Perhaps a Dexedrine— you know, a Christmas tree? They’re very good together.”
“Just the beer is fine,” he said.
She sat back down and blew her nose into a napkin. “Now, where were we? Oh, killing the Negroes . . .” He sat very still. She leaned closer and whispered. “You don’t have to worry; I’m from Georgia. We’re very discreet about these things.”
He finished the first beer and then started on the second.
“Actually,” she said, “it’s all sort of romantic, when you think about it, the boat ride and all. You’re the perfect first date. . . .” She looked at him coolly across the table, and then she leaned back in the chair, suddenly spent, dead tired. The hammering resumed— when had it stopped?— and the sedative was pulling her back. “I need some sleep,” she said.
“One thing,” he said, and she squinted, trying to focus on his face. “There was apparently a book; this Clarence Holmes kept an address book.”
She felt herself go cold. “Who?”
“Clarence Holmes,” he said. “The one who went over the side. He kept a book with some names in it.”
“Mine?”
“Yeah,” he said. “One of about sixty. I only mention it in case somebody comes by from the Orange County prosecutor’s office, you’ll know what they’re talking about. It would probably be less complicated all the way around if you didn’t know why he had your name.”
A moment passed and then, very slowly and distinctly, she said, “That should be easy enough. I’ve always found it’s easiest just to tell the truth.”
Let him take that home and sleep on it.
The funerals were both on Saturday, one in the morning, one in the afternoon. She wanted it all over in one day. There had been no telephone number in Mexico, of course, no address— as far as she knew, the Mexicans had no phones or mail delivery— so she did what she could. She bought a double plot in St. Augustine’s Cemetery, just over the Third Street Bridge, where other Mexicans were buried, and held a small Catholic service for him at the little church on the same property. During the service, she thought of the wife, with her narrow hips, waiting in Mexico for him to come home. She took sedatives, but she still thought of the wife and the unborn babies. She wept, thinking of the babies.
The parish priest was called Father Duncan, whom she knew from her volunteer work for the Democratic party. He was a stunted, narrow-faced man with a deep scar that ran from his left cheek to the right side of his jaw. Everything below the scar— including half his mouth— was as bloodless as flour and did not move with the rest of his face. He told her once that as a twenty-two-year-old graduate student he had decided to kill himself, hopeless and drunk one night at the kitchen table, but was unable even to fit the two pieces of the shotgun together so that it could be loaded. And then, he said, it had come to him in a revelation, staring at the scene carved in the stock of the gun itself, that even an ugly man could bring beauty to the world.
He was lying to her, of course— if there was one thing she knew, it was when men were lying— and so she lied back. She told him he wasn’t ugly.
He’d phoned her early on the morning after the murders to offer his help, and even floating in Dr. Speers’ sedatives, she sensed the prurient note in his voice. She was getting rid of him when she thought suddenly of the other problem, Pedro, who was Mexican after all, and Catholic.
The service had been empty. Father Duncan spoke of the dead man with a familiar affection, of his love of the sea and his loyalty to Alec Rose and his wife, Norah— all of the romance he could manufacture.
After she’d cried, thinking of the babies, she was pulled back to something the priest had said, something cheap and meaningless about a simple man and the sea, words that defined the priest’s limits better than she ever could.
Later, though, she stood at the grave site and allowed her hand to linger in his a moment longer than it needed to, and in the car on the way to the other funeral, he suddenly reached for it again and held it in both of his.
“If you need a friend,” he said, “that’s what we do. I’m always here.”
She had taken another sedative when she got in the car, and washed it down with half a glass of warm scotch. She’d found the scotch in the door compartment, along with the glass. She leaned over and patted his cheek, thinking that with a few words here and there, a certain look back across her shoulder, a borderline touch, maybe a broken lunch date— she had the distinct thought that with a little work, she could have him and the shotgun back at the old kitchen table before he knew what hit him.
Another thought along these lines came to her two hours later. The service for Alec was running long; she was exhausted and drifting, as unable to connect Alec to the things being said about him as she had been earlier with Pedro, unable even to remember, except in general terms, what he looked like, and she wondered what it meant that earlier that same day she had entertained— and
entertained
was the correct word— thoughts of driving a deformed priest to suicide. She stared at a crucifix with one eye and then the other, moving it back and forth, and then it hit her all at once.
I’m the Antichrist.
And looking around, she decided she wasn’t unhappy with that at all.
She was sitting in a folding chair, accepting condolences, nodding politely at people whose names she did not remember, who came past in a line to offer sympathy, or to recall some kindness that she and Alec had done for the underprivileged or the arts. A few of them wanted to hold her hand, or knelt to speak with their hands on her back. She was nauseated— the sedatives, the scotch, the smell of food on their breath, the heat of the room, and the crush of people. She did not want to be touched. There was a hand on her shoulder, and she stood up suddenly to move it off.
And then heard the sergeant’s voice beside her. “Your husband had a lot of friends,” he said. She turned and looked at him, Miller something. Miller Packard. Beyond Miller Packard, she could see the reception hall, two bars, several tables of food, a hundred conversations going all at once. Most of them, she knew, were about what had happened on the boat. She didn’t care about that; she only wanted this to end. This touching and talking and waiting. The milling around and talking. She saw no way that she could stop it, though. It seemed like nothing could stop it, except, she supposed, they would all eventually die themselves.
“I wish things were more specific,” she said. “I mean, I wish things had a specific ending. That someone told you when it was over.”
He looked out over the crowd, not impressed much with what he saw. “You could quit the pills.”
“Not yet,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea yet.” For a moment, she thought she heard the workmen again, hammering upstairs, and then she looked up at the ceiling and realized that she was not in her own house.
“How many did you have?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “a couple before the first service, more on the way over here.”
Her hand went absently to her breast, and she pressed into it a little, feeling the shock of pain, wanting it. The breast itself had been stitched, and the underside was bruised and dark. The discoloration extended from there to the other bruises across her stomach and pelvis. He was staring at her hand. She did not know how long it had been there, holding herself, but she let it drop now to her side.
“What do the doctors say?” he asked. He had seen the wound, and in that way he was closer to her than she wanted him to be. Yet, in another way, he was not entirely unwelcome.
“Not to worry,” she said, “they say not to worry.” She thought he might smile at that— Christ, he was always smiling at something that wasn’t funny— but he didn’t. She felt him judging her and was suddenly furious. “Is something wrong, Sergeant?” she said. “Am I slurring my words? Or is it that I’m drunk? That’s it, isn’t it? You disapprove of my drinking. Well, at least I’ve stopped laughing; you have to give me that.”
