Such Men Are Dangerous (21 page)
I stood there listening to that last sentence ringing in the air. It had come out all by itself. It was true, and it was a truth I hadn’t known about before. I could feel tears behind my eyes. I knew they wouldn’t flow, I knew it, but they were there.
I went downstairs again. Below. When I came back he said, “Paul, I give up. You don’t want to torture me. End it.”
“Do it yourself.” He didn’t understand. “Take the black pill,” I said. “You once told me I’d never do it. Neither will you. You’ve got a hollow tooth, I found it when I gagged you. Bite it, take the black pill. It’s easier than drowning.”
He breathed. In and out, in and out. “That’s what I thought. Part of you keeps thinking I’ll change my mind. That’s what I thought, but I had to find out for sure. Even when you’re under you’ll wonder if I’m going to pull you back up and let you go. You’ll keep on wondering, and then you’ll drown. Again.”
“Paul—”
I didn’t listen. I picked him up. I was surprised how easy he was to lift. He flapped like a fish, but he was still easy to lift. I wanted to make it fast now before something went wrong. I threw him overboard.
The fucking line was too short. He hung head downward, his head just a foot from the water surface, and he was screaming. I grabbed the anchor and heaved it after him, and by the time I looked he was gone.
At four o’clock I thought I heard a noise, a rumbling noise far out to sea. I went to the rail but I couldn’t see anything. It could very well have been thunder, a storm out over the Atlantic. Or my imagination.
I
D
ON’T
K
NOW
how long I stayed on the boat. For a few days I left the engines off and stayed adrift in the Atlantic. The boat became a surrogate for my island, but without the discipline. There was food and water on board. I drank water, but as far as I know I didn’t touch the food. I think I slept a lot, but all the edges of memory are blurred, and I could not say what happened and what was dream.
This did happen: One night I took off all my clothes and jumped overboard and swam out to sea, away from the ship. I may have meant to drown myself, but it could also have been a test, a game. If so, I proved what I had set out to prove, and thus lost or won, as you prefer. I couldn’t take black pills either. Somehow I swam back to the ship and managed to drag myself aboard.
That must have been a turning point, or the signal of a turning point, because the next thing I did was start the engines. I set out to run the boat south, and figured that I could stay within sight of the coast and cruise all the way around Florida to my island.
Madness has many phases. This phase was good enough to wear off before the tanks ran dry. I suddenly realized one day that I would run out of fuel and be permanently adrift in the Atlantic, and the phase instantly lost its charm.
I docked at a private marina outside of Neptune Beach, which is a shore suburb of Jacksonville. It was the middle of the night and no one was around, and I tied up my boat like a good little sailor and walked through the grounds unchallenged. Pure dumb luck, and it got me through the most genuinely hazardous part of the whole operation. There I was with no identification, someone else’s boat, and a million dollars in a metal satchel. I didn’t even realize the danger until it was long past.
The time on the boat established one thing. By the time I got off it I knew that all the things I had to do would have to wait until I was in shape to do them. Buying the land, stashing the money, everything. None of it was that goddamned urgent. It could wait. First I had to go home.
I sat in a Turkish bath in Jax until the barbershops opened. I went to one and got a shave and a haircut. A Chinese laundryman pressed my suit while I waited. Then I walked over to the terminal and got on a bus.
He didn’t recognize me. He pointed his eyes at the middle of my chest, and he put the cracker accent on hard, the way he’ll do with mainland types.
I said, “I’ll bet you forgot the dictionary, too.”
The eyes jumped, the mouth gaped. “Now I will be damned,” he said. “Now I will be paternally damned. Do you know I didn’t
know
you? By God, I don’t know as I can be blamed. No beard, next to no hair, and pale enough to pass for white.” He suddenly remembered that the radio was on and that it was against my religion. He spun around and turned it off, then turned to face me again.
“A dozen aigs and what-all else? You know, I never thought I’d get to say that again.” His face turned serious. “Thought I’d gone and lost your trade. Thought you were dead, if I’m damned for saying it. Been how long? A month?”
“About that.”
“Haven’t been sick, have you?”
“Up North.”
“About the same, some would say.” He leaned on the counter. “Well, now.”
I didn’t want to be too talkative, but I had to fill in a few blanks for him. “Sudden trip,” I said. “A boat came across from Little Table Key to pick me up.”
“Business?”
“A death.”
“Oh, now,” he said. “I am sorry. Kin of yours?”
“A friend,” I said. “My only really close friend.”
“Terrible. A young fellow, I suppose.”
“About my age.”
“Terrible. Sudden?”
I thought for a moment. “No,” I said finally. “No, not sudden. We knew it was coming. It was just a question of when.”
I told him I would hold off on restocking until I had a chance to take inventory. I explained that my own row-boat was on the island and he immediately offered to run me over. I said I’d just as soon go myself, if he knew where I could borrow a boat; I’d tow it back tomorrow or the day after. He had a dinghy with an outboard on it and said I could keep it as long as I wanted.
“And one thing you don’t walk off without, by God.” He reached under the counter, pulled out a book and slapped it down hard. It was a paperback dictionary. “That’s a bet you just lost, that I wouldn’t remember it. Oh, and there’s a story goes with it.”
He propped himself up on his elbows, grinning at the memory. “That fellow brought the dictionary, you know, and he always just goes and sets the books in the rack and clears out the old ones. Well, the wife was here at the time and of course she didn’t even think. And a couple of days go by, see, and this nigra conies in. Suit and a tie and you just knew he walked through life waiting for someone to take his photograph. Well, what does he pick out but the dictionary.
“Now you can imagine. First time in the store, and he brings this book over to the counter, and what do I have to say? ‘Oh, can’t sell you that, it’s reserved on special order.’ Which is exactly the truth, and I’d of had a better chance of convincing this nigra that I’m a bleached Chinaman myself, see? And the more I talk the madder he gets, and I just keep on explaining and explaining. Take another book, take a dozen.’ I tell him. ‘Have a Coke, free, my compliments, drink it right here in the store, hell, I’ll get you my own damn
glass.
’ And out he goes with his nose scraping the ceiling.”
He cackled. “So of course for the next three days I sat and worried about it. Every morning I woke up looking to see a picket line around the house with Martin Luther Coon himself at the head of it. You wouldn’t believe the thoughts went through my mind, and of course I never heard anymore about it, or saw that particular son of a bitch again, and doubtless never will. But that’s your dictionary, and it’s been in back of this counter ever since, and it’s marked sixty cents and cost me thirty-six, and it is yours free like the Coke the nigra wouldn’t take, because if I didn’t get thirty-six
dollars
worth of excitement out of it I don’t know what.”
And out back, when he showed me the boat, he said. “I hate to tell you this but I’d hate worse to go without. About two weeks ago I took a liberty. I went out to your island.” He turned his face away. “I thought it over and thought it over, and the wife said either you were dead and couldn’t be helped or alive and wouldn’t welcome company, but all I could think of is what if you were sick? So I took the boat around just for a look and saw
your
boat on the beach, and I thought, well, he isn’t gone anywhere, and then I saw all this weed and such on the beach, and called to you and couldn’t raise you, and that’s when I worried.
“I went ashore and just checked to see if you were about. 1 went close enough to the shack to see inside, but I swear 1 never set foot in the door or touched nothing. Then I thought, well, he must of drowned, and came back.”
I didn’t say anything. He turned to look at me. “It was a liberty, and it won’t happen again.”
“Oh, now. You were doing me a kindness.”
“I hope you’ll think so.” He snapped quickly out of the mood. “Well, now, you keep that dinghy long as you like, hear? And next time you come I’ll have that dozen aigs—”
The beach was a mess. I started to pick things up but there was too much debris and too many things to do first.
I got out of my clothes. They had been comfortable all along, but as soon as I set foot on my island they felt as though they were strangling me. Eventually I would decide whether any of them was worth keeping.
I carried the metal satchel half the length of the island. I dug a hole alongside a sick-looking palm tree and buried the box under three feet of sand.
I went to my other burying place and dug up the aluminum-foil packet. I opened it, and to the bills inside it I added my money belt and the large bills from my wallet. I kept the smaller bills and change handy for trips to Mushroom Key, and I carried my
Do Nothing
list back to the shack. I read it aloud and tacked it in place on the inside of the door. Then I read it through a second time, and only then did I go back to cover up my money belt and smooth the sand over it.
I ran one lap around the island. Ritual, perhaps; the animal staking out his territory. My wind was bad but it wouldn’t take long to improve it. I caught my breath, and then I ran out into the sea and swam around. I stayed in the water for quite a while. Then I came out and sprawled face down in the sand with the hot sun on my back.
Vacations are fun, but they’re right. The best part is getting home again.
“This will sock you right between the eyes. It’s terrific!”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Goes through you like a dose of salts and stings like iodine.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
Hmmm. I rather hope the experience of reading
Such Men Are Dangerous
isn’t quite the exercise in masochism these two reviewers make it out to be. I need all the readers I can get, and wouldn’t want to leave them all punched out, purged, and stung to a fare-thee-well.
Still, it’s nice to think the book might have an impact.
The book came about at a curious time in my own life, and one I’ve never been inclined to write about. But the afterwords I’ve been dashing off, designed to accompany my early work into an extended life in the cyberworld of epublishing, have sent me careening down memory lane, bouncing from pothole to pothole, and I might as well keep at it. And if I am indeed writing an extended inchoate memoir on the installment plan, well, so be it.
“A curious time in my own life.” Yes, I guess we can call it that.
In 1966, after an eighteen-month foray into the corporate world at Western Printing in Racine, Wisconsin, my wife and two daughters and I relocated to New Brunswick, New Jersey. My career had taken a turn for the better in Wisconsin; I’d written several books while I was there, most recently the first Tanner adventure, to be published as
The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep,
and now had Henry Morrison as my agent. (Henry and I had worked side by side at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in 1957–8, and he handled my work until Scott and I parted company. A year or two after that, he left Scott’s employ and set up on his own shop. In due course he got in touch with me, and it was he who placed Tanner with Gold Medal Books.)
Within a year, however, everything had pretty much gone to hell.
How to put it? Bluntly, I suppose, and at the same time obliquely. A very close friend and colleague was having an affair with the widow of another friend and colleague. And, sometime late in 1966, my friend’s girlfriend and I discovered, to our considerable excitement, that we were right up there with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, if not Dante and Beatrice. We had an affair that could not have been less decorous had our liaisons been staged in Macy’s window. My friend and I both separated from our wives, and there were some appalling scenes, public and private. And I went back to my wife and back to the other woman, and so on, until I felt as though I were the battered shuttlecock in a drunken game of badminton.
So I went to Ireland to regroup. I finished a Tanner book—
Tanner’s Twelve Swingers
, begun in New Jersey and completed in Dublin and set, of course, in Latvia. I was in Ireland for two months, and thinking of living there permanently, until I woke up one day in West Cork with a hangover that impressed even the locals. I flew home from Shannon and moved back in with my wife, and I hadn’t been home an hour before I knew it wouldn’t work. And it didn’t, though we were together another six years or so.
Meanwhile, my friend and his wife got a divorce, and he married the girlfriend. That didn’t work, either.
In West Cork, before the hangover, I’d felt about as hopeless as it was possible to feel, and in my inn’s library I came upon Graham Greene’s
A Burnt-Out Case
, which seemed then to have been written with me in mind. What I got from it was the insight that when one can’t go on, what one does is go on. So on I went, living again in New Brunswick, and trying to get something written. I’d started another Tanner book in Ireland—
The Scoreless Thai
—and I finished that, and then I sat around for a couple of months doing nothing much. We had a big round mahogany table in the dining room, American Empire in style, and I would sit there all day playing solitaire. Some nights I’d drink. Some nights I wouldn’t. It didn’t seem to make much difference.
I didn’t write anything because I couldn’t see the point. I just got through the days—playing solitaire, reading, drinking. Time passed. It always does.