October Light (24 page)

He was holding a long-playing record she'd left on the buffet when she was straightening up. It had been Horace's favorite,
The Afternoon of a Faun,
and a pang of memory had made her leave it out, here in the dining room where she'd see it and remember to play it. Richard stood motionless, drained of all color—it was as if someone had slapped him—and she remembered only now that it was the record she too, the Flynn girl, had always chosen first. “Oh, Richard!” she said, heart shaking with pity, and she rushed to him, spilling the drinks as she went, and caught him in her arms, still holding the drinks, and pressed her head to his chest. “Oh Richard, I'm so sorry!” They clung to each other like children and wept. How she'd loved that boy! There was nothing in this world …

It lasted only a few minutes. He gave a little laugh, drawing away from her, shaking his head and wiping his eyes, embarrassed. Head tipped, full of sorrow, she watched him compose himself, then handed him his drink.

“Richard, whatever happened between you two?” she said.

He smiled as if in panic, and for an instant it seemed he might cry again. Then he said, falsely brave, “I guess she found out about my faults.” He smiled.

“Fiddlesticks,” she said. “You have no faults.”

“Ah, Aunt Sally,” he said, “do I have faults!”

She'd pressed him no further, then or at any other time. She knew well enough what his fault was: cowardice. Or perhaps she should say half-legitimate fear of his father. He should have run away with the girl, of course. But no. “Soon,” he kept saying. Even Horace had hinted that he was stalling too long; James was already half onto them, suspicious as a hen. “In the spring,” Richard said, and seemed to mean it.

Looking around her bedroom now, the only light still on for miles, she had a sudden sense of how it must have been for him that final night, drinking in his kitchen, the Flynn girl married to another man, his Uncle Horace dead, Richard utterly alone in the only lighted room (or so it must have seemed) on the mountain. And now, abruptly, she saw in her mind's eye James' twelve gauge shotgun aimed at her door, and her heart, for a moment, beat more fiercely. “You'll pay for this, James,” she said aloud. “All of it.”

She closed her eyes to see if she was sleepy, felt fear shoot through her, a sensation like falling. Though she'd lost all faith in it, she decided again on her novel.

9

CHAINS

The east was pink.

It was only as Mr. Nit turned the crank that he realized he had perhaps made a slight miscalculation. He had wired the eels to the starter box, not to some solid metal bulkhead. It was too late now: the stage was set; the thump had come, his cue. The wooden paddle banged the eels on the nose and with a terrible hiss the charge went up the wire, burning it away like a lightning-fast fuse, and into the angle of starter wires—they went up like tissue-paper Chinese fireworks, though only the Indian was in the engine room to see it, standing in bilgewater nearly to his knees, so that if he saw it he never got to think about it. Mr. Nit scrambled down from his wooden stool quickly and ran to the engine room to see what his work had done. The Indian was floating, head down. There was nothing left in the starter box but melted plastic and ashes. On some odd impulse, an inclination toward neatness, he pulled the Indian up out of the water and draped him over the engine frame, then started up the ladder and met Peter Wagner coming down, face white as snow.

“Did we get them?” he said at the same time Peter Wagner said, “Where's the Indian?” They started over, and again both spoke at once, like clowns in some old-as-the-dinosaurs routine, so Peter Wagner jumped past him and looked through the engine room door. “He's dead all right,” he said, a sort of croak. He would come to see later that he'd judged too quickly, they'd all judged too quickly; but

Sally Abbott widened her eyes in disbelief, and read the lines again:

“He's dead all right,” he said, a sort of croak. He would come to see later that he'd judged too quickly, they'd all judged too quickly; but he believed it for the moment and started back away from the door, then stopped. He had seen the remains of the starter box. His whole face twitched. Mr. Nit, on the chance that Peter Wagner had gone mad, clambered through the hatch.

In the Captain's cabin the black called Dancer was motionless on his knees, like a Muslim praying. His toes pointed inward, his heels outward, his arms were flung out, and the right side of his face lay flat on the floor, one earring glittering. Santisillia sat where he'd fallen, in the Captain's chair, the machine gun on the floor beside him. His eyes were open, just slits.

“Whooey!” Mr. Nit said excitedly. He squatted down and gingerly picked the still burning cigarette from between Dancer's fingers.

Captain Fist stood over Santisillia, watching him as men of experience watch dead snakes. “Get 'em out of here,” Captain Fist said hoarsely. “Throw 'em overboard, and then get those engines running.”

Mr. Nit paid no attention, marveling at his work, walking slowly around and around it, so the old man waved at Jane and Mr. Goodman, sitting as if in suspended animation on the bunk.

“You hear me?” Captain Fist bellowed.

“Let them be,” Peter Wagner said, leaning on the doorframe. “It's impossible to get the engines running. The wires are burned out.”

Captain Fist twisted up his horrible face to look at Peter Wagner. “Then we're ruined?” he said.

“There's still the
Militant,”
Peter Wagner said.

Captain Fist nodded, stroking his chin, then smiled, showing his tooth-cracks. “Let's get out of here,” he said. He beckoned Mr. Goodman and Jane. They stared through him. He bent down, waved his hands in front of their faces. “What's the matter with you people?” he said. He glanced at Peter Wagner, full of holy indignation. “What's the matter with these people?”

Peter Wagner sighed. He was limp, drained of feeling.

The Captain's fingers began clawing the air and he felt around him for his cane. It lay on the floor. He saw it at last and stooped for it. Then he felt better. “Stupidity,” he said. “Stupid sentimentality. It was us or them.”

“They know that,” Peter Wagner said.

“But they don't accept it. Hah!” He was so outraged his voice became a hiss. “They defy nature. They deny reality. It's stupidity! I won't have it!” He raised his cane as if to hit them.

Peter Wagner shrugged. He wanted to sit down, but the chair was occupied and he was very tired, too tired to cross to the bunk. “They're unhappy,” he said. “They don't want to live. Why should they?”

The Captain was angrier than ever, red as a volcano-top. “They should try to be more philosophical. Did I make the world? Did I create injustice? Did I ask these people to come steal my ship and get their fat black asses electrified?” He raised one arm and shook his finger, like a preacher. “‘For we are here as on a darkling plain, swept by confused alarums of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.' Matthew Arnold. You see?
I
know about these things.” He spit as he spoke, and Peter Wagner wiped his hand across his cheek indifferently. “Now let's get out of here,” Captain Fist said. “The sooner we're rid of these dead people the better.” He snatched up Santisillia's machine gun and pushed past Peter Wagner and out onto the bridge. “To the
Militant!”
he said, and pointed, like Washington in the boat, but hunched over. He limped to the rail, climbed over it, and dropped awkwardly to the
Militant's
deck. He landed loud as a box of bolts, and swore. Mr. Nit followed. “What about my eels?” he said. Fist ignored him. “Dusky,” Fist called. “Come on out! I know you're here! You haven't got a chance!”

No answer.

Peter Wagner strained to take some action, but it was as if his mind had lost contact with his muscles.
I'm sorry,
he thought, too tired to speak. He had meant to be no one's enemy. But that was the structure of the universe: waves, particles in random collision, Platonists and Bergsonians, alphas and omegas. The lesson of what's-his-name's guppies. “All life is struggle,” someone had told him so many suicides ago that it seemed by now some earlier incarnation. He had not fully understood it at the time; even in his misery he'd taken the mildly optimistic view. But he knew now about Time and Space; understood now the hideous implications of the fact that matter is motion, and God just an atom with a question. Stasis is nothingness; refuse an atom the time to establish its atomic rhythm, its molecule, and the universe would vanish,
click,
like that. But on the other hand all motion is pain, the ball striking out at the violent bat, and all rhythmical motion is tedium. (There were certain women to whom he had made certain promises, not in so many words; there were certain bills he had allowed to mount up, and certain violent mechanisms …) At the Captain's party, Jane had put her hand very gently on his leg. He'd been stoned. So was she. Two brute mechanisms, yes yes, yes.

He was startled awake by a clicking sound, and when he looked around the cabin in alarm he discovered he was snapping his fingers. Jane sat as before, hugging herself, staring. Mr. Goodman, beside her, had his hands up, covering his face. The dead—or rather what he thought were the dead—were as before. And then the engine of the
Militant
started up.

With the growing rumble, he rose to something approaching full consciousness. The old bastard would strand all three of them without a second thought if he didn't get Jane and Mr. Goodman to the
Militant.
He pulled at Mr. Goodman's arms, and when the man neither came nor resisted, Peter Wagner turned around, crouched, and pulled him up onto his back. He squeezed through the cabin door with him and staggered down the bridge to the rail, then dropped him like a sandbag to the
Militant's
deck.

“God damn you, Dusky, where are you?” Fist was calling.

Peter Wagner puffed as he would do when lifting weights, then went back to the cabin for Jane. When he reached the bridge with her he realized that the
Indomitable
was moving. He stood baffled, straining to understand. Then Captain Fist came hobbling onto the
Militant's
deck. He was shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” Mr. Nit came out behind him, popping his knuckles. “Fantastic discovery,” Mr. Nit yelled up. “Fantastic!” Captain Fist, in his joy, threw his hat in the air. The breeze took it, and Mr. Nit went after it, two-thirds the length of the boat.

The discovery was an accident. They'd forgotten to unlash the
Militant
from the
Indomitable,
and they'd found that the
Militant,
small as she was, could haul the
Indomitable
like an oceangoing tug. They need not abandon the
Indomitable's
cargo capacity after all.

“Help me up!” Captain Fist called. Why he insisted on riding in the larger boat, since they'd both be going pretty much the same place, was not clear. His dignity maybe; sense of theater, reality transcended. Peter Wagner ignored his appeal for help—hardly heard it, in fact. Mr. Nit bent over, Captain Fist scrambled up onto his back, grunting, and climbed back aboard the
Indomitable.
“What luck!” he said, smiling like a shark, “what luck!” Peter Wagner stood as before, with Jane in a fireman's carry on his shoulder. Captain Fist limped past him, shaking his head at his good fortune. Inside his cabin he called back, “Somebody throw these people overboard.”

Down on the deck of the
Militant,
Mr. Goodman sat up, rubbing his head.

“Full Speed to Lost Souls' Rock,” howled Captain Fist.

Mindlessly, robbed of will, Peter Wagner set the course. He was a man in a dream, his brain going over and over, as many times before in his life, the same unimportant facts. Tears streamed from his eyes, though he was aware of no emotion. He heard Santisillia's elegant, theatrical voice; saw Dancer's apocalyptic joy. He had lifted Dancer's body from the floor to put it on the Captain's bunk, and when the Captain said, “What are you doing? Get it out of here!” he had heard, had registered, and had immediately forgotten. It had seemed to him for an instant that Dancer was not dead after all, and the feeling was so strong that he'd leaned over to listen for a heartbeat. But then the Captain had shouted, and he'd forgotten what he was doing, moving from instant to instant like a drunk. The memory of his wife was smiling at him, her lip bleeding, her eyes rich with scorn. He felt, in brief panic, a need—like the desperate need for a cigarette—for some book, some tale of high adventure.

Now, in the wheelhouse, he concentrated on the tremor of the compass needle as if the place they were going were important. But even the compass was more than he could fix on. It came to him at last that Mr. Goodman was beside him.

“You should sleep,” Mr. Goodman said. He put his hand on Peter Wagner's shoulder.

It was a difficult concept. He concentrated on the ring of brass, brooding on
Ahead
and
Stop
and
Reverse.
His chest filled with panic. “Is Jane all right?” But he was thinking:
What of motion in all directions simultaneously?

“She's coming around,” Mr. Goodman said. “Go on in and talk to her. And get something to eat. Here, I'll take the wheel.” Though his chest was wide, his face was undeveloped, ministerial.

The pink dawn was brightening, false as stagelight. Captain Fist had gone back onto the
Militant,
too persnickety to sleep with the dead.

“Someone should move the Indian,” Peter Wagner said.