Wolf Point (23 page)
Lester said, “You so sad, Jenny.” While she was still looking away from him, out to the ocean, he put the gun to her forehead almost gently and held it with both hands as he fired. Her body flew over the side and into the river and he turned to watch as it fell behind them and only when it had disappeared under the water did he look back to T.
At the sight of Lester pulling out the gun, T had used the guitar as a crutch and partially lifted himself to his feet. Then he fell back at the gunshot, so that he was sitting on the bow with his arms wrapped tightly around the neck of the guitar case.
Lester said, “It a sordid life,” and raised the gun listlessly.
T jumped back and then fell off the boat and into the water with the guitar case. He watched the engine roar past as he
followed the path of the boat, expecting it to turn around and come back for him. Instead, the engine roared louder and the bow lifted higher and then there was another flash and the pop of the gun firing and Lester flying backward over the transom and disappearing instantly in the boat’s wake.
Alongside T, the guitar case floated top up, the snaps six inches above water. T grasped it under his good arm and found that he could lean most of his weight on it without submerging the snaps. He laid his head down on the hard plastic and watched the little sliver of aluminum boat until it finally disappeared into the darkness, leaving him alone with the silence and the water and the raging stars.
When he leaned a little to the right, sliding his cheek along the wet plastic of the guitar case, he could see the hole in his chest. Hours ago the last scrap of bandage had floated away, revealing raw, puckered skin around a blood-black, dime-sized puncture in the alarming vicinity of his heart. He clutched the guitar case, careful to keep the snaps above water. All night it had carried him through the darkness, holding to the surface of the Saint Lawrence so resolutely he thought the thing could be marketed as a life preserver—as long as he kept the water out of it, kept the sea from seeping into it. He concentrated on that, on keeping the guitar case flat as he floated through the last minutes of night, his eyes on the horizon, waiting for the sun to emerge out of the river. It was easier now to keep the guitar case level, now that morning was near and the sea was so still
it reflected the stars and the moon, now that the wind had died down to nothing. Earlier, in the deep hours of night, he had struggled to keep hold, his arm wrapped tightly around the solid plastic case as wind slicked his hair against his head and whipped the surface of the water into froth. He had fought all night to hold on, aided by Lester’s black pills, which were wearing off now. He could feel them wearing off, and as their effects faded, so did his strength. As first light neared, he clung to the guitar case with the mild hope of being seen. He reminded himself that this was the Saint Lawrence Seaway and many ships traveled these lanes, and if he could just hold on till it was fully light, if he could keep his one good arm wrapped tightly around the guitar case and keep the thing flat so the water wouldn’t get in, if he could keep it from tilting and hold on a little longer it would be light soon, and he was floating in the shipping lanes and he might be seen. He told himself that he had held on already through the night and the sky was growing lighter as the stars faded, though the moon was still bright. But it was getting harder. His body wanted to loosen its grip and his mind had to have a talk with it. He had to explain. Morning was coming. It would be light. A ship might see him.
Night had seemed endless. Lester was right, though: through the long hours, thanks to the black pills, he had felt no pain. But neither was his mind right. On and off he had slipped into a kind of waking dream: the hard black guitar case once became a downy white pillow and his head sank into it as it shaped itself to the contours of his face. For a brief moment,
the guitar turned into a boat pulling him to shore. At another point, the neck of the guitar was a corridor he swam into out of rough water, like swimming onto a beach, only when he lifted himself up out of the waves he was at the head of a long hallway, bathed in reddish light. He shook the sea from his body and found himself dry and dressed comfortably in jeans and T-shirt. Barefoot, he walked in the red light and he knew the corridor was actually the neck of the guitar and he was walking toward a place he all along had been meant to find, a place that was like a mountain in sunlight or a meadow thick with wildflowers, a place that sang to him, a place where he was meant to look, to smell, to hear, to touch, and he walked toward it along the red corridor only to find himself suddenly again out on the black water with a stinging mist blowing into his eyes, struggling to keep from drowning, to keep from joining Lester and Jenny at the bottom of the river.
He imagined them, Lester and Jenny, floating alongside each other, their bodies bouncing lazily off rocks, bumping along the bottom pushed by currents, their long hair trailing behind them, rippling luxuriously strand by strand, rising and falling in the deep water’s swells. He saw Jenny’s beautiful hair. He saw her watery eyes open, still looking east over the river, wondering where Lester was taking her. She had no idea what was coming. None at all. She was only looking out over the river and wondering where they were going. In the riled water, holding on for his life, T mumbled, “What chance did she ever have?” and he was thinking not only of that final moment on the boat but of her life. He thought,
She was seduced
and betrayed while she was still a child,
and a moment later he found himself recalling the pornographic image he had downloaded, the one that had started all his trouble, and then he was there, inside that trailer, just outside the frame of the image, as if in a kind of cosmic dark that surrounded the real world or in a shadowy darkness beyond the lighted image.
The woman and the girl were stretched out on the sofa, and the woman stroked the girl’s hair and cooed sweet sounds into her ear. T in the darkness was amazed that he could hear those sounds, and he realized that being able to hear was the striking difference between being there and just seeing the picture. There, in the shadows, in the surrounding dark, he heard the woman whispering promises into the child’s ear, and there, so close, he saw clearly that the girl in her arms was a beautiful child, and he knew somehow that she was more beautiful in that moment than she would be ever again. It was as if it were the child’s last moment and he knew it, and then a man who had been standing beside him in the darkness stepped into the light and T knew immediately at the sight of that bulky, hirsute body what was about to happen. He watched with his heart racing as the man approached the child and the child turned her cheek into the woman’s breast and opened her mouth. He could see that the child was full of the woman’s words and she wanted what was about to happen, and then he was there, at the exact erotic moment arrested in the photographic image, only now, when the man entered her and T heard the sound that issued from the girl’s lips, instead of the sensual moan he had imagined, a groan of pain rose up out of
the belly of the child, a sound agonized and terrible. T saw her locked in the woman’s arms, and then he was in the next moment, the moment after the moment in the image, and he saw the child crying for all that was lost and all that would follow, and, in the next moment, she looked at him. She found T in the shadows, her eyes met his eyes, and T was ashamed. He closed his eyes to hide from her gaze. When he opened them again, he was back on the Saint Lawrence and the river around him for as far as he could see was littered with the bodies of young women, multitudes of bodies floating under the eye of the moon. For several long moments he could not shake it off, that vision of countless young women, raped, beaten, murdered, bruised, in shackles, in chains, all of them floating out to sea, all of them beautiful.
In time the river returned to black waves and white froth, and it held him for hours more as his thoughts settled and calmed, though they also grew fuzzier, less distinct, the clarity of that terrible image lost as he recalled a long sequence of memories involving his own children, the most vivid a memory of the red maple in their front yard shedding leaves in an autumn wind, in a leaf storm, the red and yellow leaves falling thick as snowflakes, and the kids, Evan and Maura, running wildly through the falling leaves with their arms outstretched, yelling in the big wind, their open mouths full of joyful shouts. After a time, even those memories disappeared and he was left with a growing pain in his chest and arm, a pain that threatened to overwhelm him, and he slid his head along the slick black plastic to look at the hole in his chest. The sky over-head
was beginning to lighten, the stars and moon beginning to fade, and out of somewhere something howled, a piercing growl, and he looked down into the bright yellow ball of the sun high on the horizon. Below him, he could feel Lester and Jenny swimming in the depths, as if trailing beneath him, and he tried to tell Lester, no, no, it’s not, the world is not what he, what Lester, said, but then T let that go, that desire to tell, and he held Maura’s hand and Evan’s hand and he focused entirely on the wavering yellow ball of the sun flickering over the green surface of the water, and then there were men in bright orange jackets trying to speak to him, only they spoke in tongues, they babbled, and then they were behind and alongside him as the guitar was pulled away and his body floated, held in Carolyn’s loving arms, and various memories fluttered through his mind like Carolyn’s snowflakes rocking lazily down as he was lifted into the hum and vibration of movement, into the skimming over water, the jostle and lurch, until a black wall of steel bore down on him and he struggled to find Carolyn in the stern at the engine and saw instead a bright orange jacket wrapped around a bearded man. T said, “Carolyn’s dead,” and the orange jacket beside him said
okay, okay
and nodded as he wrapped a blanket around him and then there was a great whirring sound as they rose out of the water, pulled up along a black wall into the heavens.
Kolympari, Crete, April 2003
During the invasion of Iraq, T fell in with a group of fellow Americans in Crete. Nights they huddled together to watch the massive bombing of Baghdad and days they looked over their shoulders, concerned for their own safety. It was a time of quick friendships and T found himself in the regular company of an American writer and his physician wife, a pair of decent, generous people around whom a kind of old-fashioned salon revolved. They opened their home to artist friends from all over the world, most of whom only visited for a week or two, though one woman, an artist in her late forties, had been staying with them when T arrived in January and had no immediate plans to leave. Between the writer and his wife and their friends, there were always a
half-dozen or so people with whom he might enjoy a social evening, or a late dinner at the Argentina, or a day of hiking and swimming.
Typically, though, he spent his days exploring the beaches on the coast or the mountains of the interior. It was his habit to get up before dawn and sit out on his deck with a cup of Turkish coffee, where he watched the sun come up over the Aegean, the bright circle of light arising as if out of the sea itself. After breakfast he’d gather up his maps and guidebooks, pick an interesting spot somewhere on the island, drive to it, and spend the day exploring and taking pictures. He shot a roll or two most days, then on Saturdays went into Hania, where he had contact sheets made. In the four months he’d been taking pictures, he’d managed a dozen shots he liked enough to have enlarged and framed. Several of them he’d already given away, to the writer and the doctor and their friends; the others were in his study; one, his favorite, a shot of the late-afternoon sun exploding into an offshore cave, he had hung in his living room. He intended, sooner rather than later, to build a darkroom behind the kitchen.
His brief, violent weekend with Jenny and Lester had already settled into a dreamy memory. Sometimes it seemed impossible that he had picked up a pair of young hitchhikers and almost paid for that bit of recklessness with his life. After his hallucinatory night on the Saint Lawrence, he had spent close to a month in the hospital recovering from complications caused by the gunshot wound, which by itself had done
limited serious damage, but the bullet had lodged close to his heart, and after much debate the doctors had gone in and removed it. During his hospital stay, Alicia had come to visit him, as had Maura and Evan. Alicia had entered the room guardedly, clearly not knowing what to expect, given he had pretty much thrown her out of his house the last time they’d met. When he apologized to her for all that had gone wrong between them, when he told her he wanted to let it go and move on, she only nodded at first, and then she touched his leg—she was sitting alongside his bed—and laid her head down on the mattress, her forehead against his thigh. She looked away from him as he stroked her hair.
Soon after Alicia’s visit, Maura came; and then a week later Evan walked through the door. He sat in a chair near the foot of the bed. His first words were, “Mom said I should come to see you,” which he issued as if a challenge, as if to reassert his anger. T told him how glad he was to see him, how much it meant to him that he had made the trip. Evan nodded. When the silence thickened, T told him about his night on the water, as he had told Alicia and Maura before him. He told him about the hallucinations, the travels he had taken inside the body of the guitar—and he told him how, on the edge of losing consciousness, his mind had taken comfort in memories that were so intense they felt real, as if he were back again living through them—and he told him that one of the last things he remembered was Maura and Evan as children shouting and running wildly through a big wind in autumn, the air around
them thick with a blaze of brightly colored leaves. Evan said yes, he remembered that too. Then he got up and touched T’s shoulder and said he was sorry but he had to leave.