Fun With Problems (9 page)

In the morning, somewhat to their astonishment, Eric and his bag had vanished. Their dinner table was clean and scrubbed, the dishes all washed and stacked. Eric had left a daisy and a wild rose on the table, and a note with them that read:

"Daisies are better than meat, and roses are sweeter than wine."

"Fuck's that mean?" Taylor asked her.

When she went outside the fog was still heavy on the island. As she drove Taylor to the ferry slip they passed Eric slogging unhappily downhill.

"It's him!" Taylor said, craning his neck to look.

"Yup." Annie said.

"Well, at least you didn't stop to give him a ride."

"At least he's not riding a black helicopter," said Annie.

At the ferry slip armed men in flak jackets who looked as though they actually belonged in black helicopters had more or less barricaded the dock.

"You're late for school," Taylor told his wife as he put his ID card around his neck. "Better rush."

"I'm late anyway." She watched Taylor hold up his papers in a surly way for the agents. They looked after him briefly as he walked up the gangway.

Annie drove back through town and up the hill toward home. On the way she passed Eric making slow progress down. She made a two-point turn and pulled up beside him.

"C'mon, Eric," she said. "I'll give you a ride as far as town." Eric threw his bag in the back and climbed into the passenger seat.

"Do you remember us?" she asked him. "Taylor and me?"

"I remember you."

"Thanks for the daisy," she said. "Hey, you're the height of weirdness."

"Right."

"You were living dangerously last night."

"Yeah. I blunder into that." As they rounded a bluff over the ocean, going slowly in the bad visibility, Eric said, "I fell in love with you. You're beautiful."

She laughed.

"But really," Eric said. He seemed close to tears. "I love you, Annie."

"Yeah? You're funny. Last night you were a scream."

"Didn't you feel it?"

"I'll take you as far as town," Annie said. "Don't forget your bag."

"But didn't you?"

"I'm attracted to you," she said. "That's true."

He raised his hand to his forehead. "So?"

"So nothing," she said.

On Heron's Neck that morning the Secretary was cross. When the steward came knocking he swore at the man.

"Aye aye, sir," the steward said soothingly through the door. Of course they were Navy stewards and that was naval usage, but it was not a phrase often heard outside the uniformed branch. Then, from a distant corridor, what sounded like a disrespectful utterance echoed for a second or two. Some barbarous holler, maybe in Tagalog. It was strange and it made the Secretary angry. Certain arms of the naval intelligence service believed an Austronesian-speaking spy agency was providing Moro jihadis with information on naval operations. It was similar to the Mormon yeoman spies the Joint Chiefs had run in the Nixon days and to the Mossad frames that functioned with American collaborators under several Israeli governments.

The fog was thicker than ever. There was a breeze spinning the mist but it seemed not to help, and the settled damp looked dirty to the Secretary. No poetry in this soiled cotton blanket. The Secretary actually wrote poetry. One poem began:

If I manifest manhood'S pride
Yet I know its pain, its secret
Griefs...

Not much poetry in anything that day, though. And he had the odd feeling that the night before, his six-month plan had been brushed aside politely. Better, he thought, to have kept his mouth shut and waited for signals.

There seemed no question of flight this Monday. Coast Guard cutters prowled the fog for foolhardy windsurfers, lost sport fisherman, disoriented boaters. The Navy's small boats were one cape away. The Secretary ordered that the ferry be chartered again. His security detail drove him to the pier.

"I guess it didn't occur to you to provide for this," he said to the chief of his detail as they drove over the moor. Depressing dark green vegetation, what you could see of it.

"Sir" was all the agent said. A swarthy man, short hair treated at the top in some contemporary fashion. The Secretary looked at him long enough for his stare to register. "I suppose that's not your job." The damn automated foghorn kept sounding its cadences as it had in and out of his anxious dreams.

"Transport confirmed at the seat of government, Mr. Secretary."

A gruff military type, the Secretary thought. More gruff than ought to be allowed. The Secretary wanted some explication of the agent's jargon but thought better of it. He knew enough to recognize it as an unfavorable portent. Everyone seemed ill-tempered, even people who had no right to be.

On Heron's Neck, the Secretary had spent an uneasy night, though not for want of medication. He had lain awake a long time, and just when he began to drop off, a steward rapped quietly but insistently at his door. The
steward knocked quietly out of discretion, but also because, awakened suddenly, the Secretary sometimes shouted. Even
screamed,
the stewards told each other, and the word passed into use from the Secretary's households into government and political circles. A woman he happened to know who had called him owlish had also referred to him as Screamin' Newton. Someone had managed to let him know this, a false friend, a subordinate who had not been well-intentioned toward either of them. The word was that the pressures were getting to him.

While the Secretary waited in his vehicle on the dock, his security detail's chief and Captain Negus of the MV
Squanto
were having a bad-tempered, pointless exchange over the gangway's having been down all night. The chief of security had angered Negus by insisting the captain had been ordered to secure it.

"Wasn't by you," Captain Negus said.

"No, it wasn't by me, Ace. Personally, not by me. But you were ordered to keep the vessel secure with the gangway up. That didn't get done, did it? So guess what?"

Captain Negus did not like to be dressed down by people in sunglasses, which, off season, he took as a sign of moral inauthenticity. He was a buoyant soul, pretty easygoing but not used to scoldings. When the local Coasties checked his underway on-board passenger numbers or the supply of children's life jackets, the atmosphere was not chummy, but it was respectful, and there were handshakes without snipe or snip or snot like with the goddamned Heron's Necks. Captain Negus did not like being asked to "guess what?" because it brought to mind his unhappy childhood. Least of all did he like being addressed by a younger man as Ace. Captain Negus was proud of his past military time, although he shared several attitudes with Taylor Shumway, who was after all his second cousin.

"You'll have to tell me, mister. I ain't much of a guesser."

What the gruff agent delighted in telling him was that the boat would have to be gone over completely again, big spaces and small spaces, because the enemy's devices came in all shapes and sizes. His crew would have to have their papers checked again. It would take a lot of goddamn time and the Secretary would have to wait and the scheduled customers would have to take the ferry after his. When they walked out from under the car deck, the rain was falling harder and the security detail had put on their lettered rainwear and were reading the crewmen's laminated IDs again. A Coast Guard engineman, a boatswain's mate and one of the detail went through the vessel's spaces for the second time.

After the security detail finished with the captain and crew and allowed them behind the auto barrier, the Secretary got out of his car and began measuredly pacing the plank section of the pier. He was so angry that he found it necessary to imagine subordinates, inadequate ones, close by. It was better than feeling alone. Sometimes, alone in silence, he would imagine dialectical conflicts with enemies, turning their taunts against them, making them out to be utter fools. Of course they were imaginary. Two agents monitored the ovoid orbit of his pacing.

The rain eased again. Soon segments of blue appeared overhead. "What do they pay these weather dudes?" someone in the waiting group asked. "They should stick to balloons or drones," someone else said, and a third person muttered under her breath. But they did not seem to be changing arrangements. The Secretary continued his rotations.

When it became plain to the small civilian crowd that no one would share the Secretary's boat in any weather, folks began sauntering away. Some strolled toward the pretty town, some to see if they could reclaim Heron's Neck.

Captain Negus and Taylor Shumway stood on the A deck, one up from the car deck, looking at the scene. Scully, a boozy but efficient deck sailor from away, stood beside Jimmy Slaughter, the dockmaster, who was very short and fat. Jimmy never went to the mainland, and for that reason never bothered about his few yellow teeth, which were mostly lower incisors. His appearance annoyed the senior menials at Heron's Neck, which cheered him somewhat. Jimmy had two assistants, his children. One was Jin, the pretty blonde in the Bosox cap on the dock. The other was Jimmy Slaughter Junior, a youth with his father's shape but with fresher tattoos and the island's first, only, and apparently last Mohawk. Both male Slaughters had been impressed for the trip across.

"Son of a bitch tells me I ain't allowed onto my own goddamn boat all night," Captain Negus said.

"Lookit the Secretary or whatever," Scully said. "Fuck-face dimwit. Turkey."

"Jeez," Jimmy Slaughter said, "gimme a passenger load of drunks anytime over these weasels." He shook his head at them, causing one security agent to frown from the dock.

"Yah, well," Jimmy's cocky son told his father. "Good money for this, right?"

"Ya," the captain said, "you get a receipt but ya gotta wait for it. Your fuckin' fuel's twice as much by then. Taxpayers don't get it. Never will. Fuckin' nation of sheep."

"'He calleth his own sheep by name,'" Taylor said rather bitterly.

"So? That there's in the Bible or what?" Scully asked. But Taylor was too amazed and upset to answer. He had recognized a man on the dock as his recent guest, Eric. He began to tremble.

Some of the disappointed passengers and their friends were being accosted by Eric with a notebook. They appeared to appraise him as a nobody at best. Eric also approached some of the politicians, who with their wives graciously eased around him with sour looks. One politician wished him a pleasant morning. Another actually said that it was good to see him again. But it became obvious to the Secretary's detail, if not to the Secretary himself, that Eric's spindle-legged progress was directed toward that official.

Scully was trying to engage Taylor for reassurance. The kid had his fits, not that he couldn't work right through them. No one could say he wasn't a good worker. Scully was also trying to engage Captain Negus's eye.

"Know what?" Scully said. "Now they took Johnny Damon down there and made him look like a fuckin' salesman." By "down there" Scully meant New York or Washington or anywhere. Scully called Cape Ann "down there" and the Bay of Fundy "down there."

"You're right," Taylor said, but he never lost sight of Eric. His thoughts were confused but his anger was not in the least diminished. "I'll be a son of a bitch," he said. No one responded to this.

Scully went on about Johnny Damon.

"Fuckin' Steinbrenner," he cawed. "Says he looks good now, he looks like a Yankee." He noticed Taylor's evil eye on the pier. "I kinda liked it when Johnny Damon looked sort of like you, Taylor."

Below them, the Secretary was screaming at Eric. Eric was trying to smile. But the Secretary simply kept screaming, halting some of the in-crowd—though only for a moment—in their tracks.

"Look at the little rat," the Secretary screamed. The chief of security put his weight against the Secretary as if assisting him to stand. He might also have seemed to be holding him back. Ignoring the Secretary, two other agents, one male, one female, were taking Eric down.

"Why are they doing that to him?" Taylor asked.

"They better do that on town property," said Negus. "I don't want that crap on the
Squanto.
A passenger got certain rights."

"Stay down, sir," said the female agent as the Secretary carried on. They succeeded in leveling Eric to the wet pavement. Other agents came over quietly. The one in closest custody of Eric was a black woman in a gray pantsuit.

"I wanted to especially ask you," he told the woman. "I hoped we could talk."

"You lucked out." She lifted Eric's leg as though she were about to make a wish on him while her colleagues kept him prone. She ran cupped hands up the khaki pants, ripped out the cuffs where they had been sewed and twisted Eric's leg to rotate it on the hipbone, each twist eliciting a groan. Then she let the leg fall.

"When's the last time you ate, sir?" she asked him. Eric mistook her question for solicitude, but it was just profiling.

"Christ," Taylor asked no one special, "t sn't he one of them or what?"

"Shit," said Jimmy Slaughter Senior, "you fuckin' got me. Don't seem they like him a lot."

The town constable's patrol car, which had been idling behind a taffy stand, rolled out to receive Eric. The chief security agent, the one Captain Negus particularly disliked, was trying to make himself heard in the pilothouse, turning colors, dancing, silently singing, waving his hands alternately in menace, supplication, inviting harmonies. He wanted the captain to get the boat under way. The Coast Guard had driven their Secretary, invincible within the vehicle, thirty feet onto the car deck. The security agent refused to stop capering below the wheelhouse.

Negus buried it all under the sounding of his vessel's horn. He hardly looked down at the agent, who was half kneeling, holding his ears.

On the pier Eric was smiling dementedly.

"Well I'll be goddamned," Taylor said. "That dipstick thought it was a joke."

"He was over your house last night, I heard," Jimmy Slaughter said.

Taylor grunted.

As they pulled away from the pier, Officer Ussolini, the constable, drove Eric slowly up the hill in his squad car. "I thought he was one of them," Taylor told Scully. They were swabbing an interior passage that had been soiled by the authorities' unnecessary second inspection.