by R.J. Ellory
Harper turned.
‘Frank Duchaunak. He drove you here from your aunt’s on Carmine Street?’
Harper nodded.
‘And did he say where he was going?’
‘To see his Captain,’ Harper said. ‘He said I was to wait here, that someone would come and see me. He said that he’d tell them what happened at the Carmine Street house, and that he had to go and see his Captain. Why?’
She smiled, shook her head. ‘No reason,’ she said.
Harper said nothing.
‘I’ll call you,’ she said. ‘I’ll call to see you’re okay.’
‘Whatever,’ Harper said, his tone disinterested.
‘Do you want someone to talk to about this . . . I mean, apart from everything that happened . . . do you want someone to speak to about your father, about Evelyn?’
Harper turned and looked at her, an expression of disbelief on his face. ‘Talk to someone? What d’you mean?’
‘We have people who are trained to—’
‘To help me deal with this? Is that what you’re saying? You have people who are trained to deal with this shit?’ He shook his head. ‘Get out of here. Just get the fuck out of here, will you?’
She paused by the door, paused for just a moment, and then she was gone.
Harper didn’t move for a while, and then he rose slowly, walked to the window, and leaning his hands against the glass he looked out through the spaces between his fingers.
New York, he thought. Sinatra’s town. He tried to imagine such a place being his home. It didn’t work. He bowed his head; he closed his eyes.
It was a long time before he moved.
EPILOGUE
Perhaps it is to here that I have been travelling all my life.
He feels no pain, no emptiness. He feels nothing that demands any attention.
Above and beneath everything there is no guilt; this more than anything.
Standing there, looking out towards the keys of Fish Hawk and Snipe, beyond that Johnston and Sawyer, the name in and of itself a small and quiet irony, John Harper believes that everything has in some way turned full circle.
He took the Greyhound Bus; made eight stops between Miami and Key West. Down through Islamorada, Key Largo, Marathon and Grassy Key; two routes – one from the Florida Turnpike which wound up in Homestead, the other along I-95 which became US 1 at the southern end of Miami. Both roads made it to the Overseas Highway, but this time he’d kept on going.
And there was something about this place – all thirty-one punctuations of limestone, the eight hundred uninhabited islands that surrounded them – that forever gripped his imagination. Here, on this awkward peninsula of hope, he believed himself a million miles from the memory of New York.
South and east was the Atlantic, west was the Gulf of Mexico; forty-two bridges, dozens of causeways; gingerbread verandas, widow’s walks, wrought-iron balconies; John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park with its starfish and lobsters, its sponges and sea cucumbers, its stingrays, barracuda, crabs and angel fish.
And then there was Key Largo, shoals of blackfin tuna, overhead the waves of frigate birds that told you when the fish were running. And the smell, the once-in-a-lifetime smell of salt, seaweed, fish and marsh, mangrove swamps and rocks, the memory of pirates and Ponce de Leon, the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut . . .
All these things a hundred and fifty miles from where he’d once sat in a small backroom office in the Miami Herald complex.
And all these things were now his home.
John Harper understood that to feel no guilt was not a crime.
He understood that time would pass, and as it did a certain vague and indefinable shadow would close over the past, and the past would become a representation of what he once had been, not what he would become.
He did not stay in New York.
He answered as many questions as he could bear – questions from Federal people, from Captain Michael McLuhan, others whose names he could not now recall. He asked for Frank Duchaunak, for Cathy Hollander, but neither of them appeared. He told them of Thomas McCaffrey, of the final minutes in the house on Carmine. They acted like Thomas McCaffrey didn’t exist, and they forwarded no details of his whereabouts.
They went over Duchaunak’s final words to him; exactly what had been said, how Duchaunak had looked, every nuance and possibility. Harper told them what he could remember, which was not very much at all.
Harper attended no funerals, paid no respects. He felt that such a gesture would have been as much a lie as those he’d been told.
He left New York on the twenty-seventh of December.
He believed – in his black and broken heart – that he would never go back.
John Harper no longer works for the Herald. He no longer speaks to Harry Ivens, or any of the others who populated the life he lived before New York.
He never spoke to Cathy Hollander again, for she never called, and Harper believed that such an omission was perhaps a good thing.
Harper believes now that the muse has come home; he finds his dry narrative and his succinct prose, and he sits before a battered typewriter, ahead of him the doors open, beyond them the plankboard veranda . . .
He moved all the way south to the end of the peninsula, and he writes.
Because that was, and still is, what he was supposed to do:
Passionate, impassioned, bruised, forgotten, lost; grabbing at life in handfuls too broad to be carried. And staggering now, heart empty, folding beneath the vast weight of loss like an origami bird crushed within a fist. An angry fist, whitek-nuckled and pained. Sweating, wide-awake, the dawn was cold, brutally cold, and I longed for morning if only to know another day had started, and thus be certain – irrevocably certain – that a day such as this would end. But this day, of all days, I lost my father. In a moment of brutality that was some ironic reflection of his own life, he was subjected to truth and reality. And it was the truth – above and beyond all else – that finally killed him. Another light. Silently, almost unnoticed . . . another light went out in New York.
Come nightfall John Harper walks out onto the beach. He knows that Hemingway and Williams, John Hersey, James Merrill, Tom McGuane and Phil Caputo . . . knows that all of them once stood right where he stands, and they too looked out towards the Keys of Fish Hawk, Halfmoon and Little Truman. He hesitates in the footprints of giants, and there – at the southernmost point of the continental United States – John Michael Harper, he of the dry and bitter humor, he of the lost loves and lonely nights, he of clenched fists and once-silent typewriter, he of burgeoning promise and unfulfilled potential, knows that he has come home.
Home, perhaps, is not where the heart is, but where – at last – you find it.
He had been there a month, perhaps a little more, when the package came.
He’d rented a place, nothing more than a plankboard shack truth be known, but the roof was sufficient, and the wood was strong, and he felt safe and detached and hopeful. He had a little money, nothing to speak of, and he knew that at some point such an absence of provision would demand his attention. For the meanwhile it seemed unimportant, irrelevant, a responsibility that was awkward and unharmonious.
So the package came by hand; a mailman walked down the sand road at the top of the beach, and he smiled as he gave Harper the package and said his good day. The package was wrapped in brown paper, the size of a large shoebox, and when Harper opened it, tentative, curious, he took a moment to inspect the careful script with which the address was written. It seemed to be a disguised hand, as if someone had not wished their writing to be identified.
The package had made its way from somewhere to the Miami Herald, where someone had forwarded it to Harper’s previous address, and from there someone had impelled it to find him come what may. And find him it had.
Inside the box, stacked neatly, bound tight with rubber bands, was three hundred thousand dollars in
used fifty-dollar bills.
There was something else, wrapped in newspaper, wedged in the corner, and when Harper opened it he started laughing.
A baseball.
A beat-to-shit baseball with someone’s name scrawled along the line of stitching.
Harper put the money back in the box. He hid the box beneath the floor. He told no-one.
The baseball he kept on his desk, right beside his typewriter, and every once in a while he would hold it and think of Norma Jean.
He never heard word of the sender, and it seemed that no-one else did. Harper believed he was out there somewhere, out there living his own kind of crazy, and the world had swallowed him silently and allowed him to disappear.
Standing now, looking out towards Key Sawyer as the sun rises, as it bravely escapes the line of horizon, Harper is reminded of Roth and Auster, Selby, Styron, all those before him that had written of New York. For it was the center of everything; a microcosm which represented all that was senseless and beautiful about the world.
And once more he felt no shame, no guilt, no desire to question the method or motive of his own existence. For a while, a short while perhaps, he would simply be himself, and in being himself he would experience all that such a thing entailed.
The wind picks up. The sun breaks the surface of the water and lights the sky quietly. The smell of the sea fills his nostrils. He is reminded of Styron in that moment, and how he had so eloquently paraphrased Emily Dickinson. He thinks of Sophie, Styron’s heroine, how she had been forced by life to make her decision, a decision much the same as his own mother.
It was her choice, a choice so difficult, and yet so brutally simple.
And then Harper smiles and does not think of such things. For to think of such things brings darkness and pain, and these things he believes he has owned enough.
He knows now that this is not judgement day – only morning.
Morning: excellent and fair.