A Tip on a Turtle
Page 3
“And it always turns out the way you expect?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“You’re scary, Nicholas. How long have you been able to do stuff like this?”
“Does that matter?” he asked. “Does it really?”
He asked her to have dinner with him again, but there was something perfunctory about the invitation, as though he were offering it only because the hour was getting toward dinnertime and they happened to be standing next to each other just then.
She accepted quickly, perhaps too quickly. But the dining terrace was practically empty when they reached it—they were very early, on account of the cancellation of the races—and the meal was a stiff, uncomfortable affair. He was so obviously bothered by her persistent inquiries about his baffling skill, his special something, that she soon backed off, but that left little to talk about except the unchanging perfect weather, the beauty of the hotel grounds, and rumors of racial tension elsewhere on the island.
He toyed with his food and ate very little. They ordered no wine. It was like sitting across the table from a stranger who was dining with her purely by chance. And yet less than twenty-four hours before she had spent a night in this man’s bed.
She didn’t understand him at all. He was alien and mysterious and a little frightening. But somehow, strangely, that made him all the more desirable.
As they were sipping their coffee she looked straight at him and sent him a message with her mind:
Ask me to come dancing with you, next. And then let’s go to your cottage again, you bastard.
But instead he said abruptly, “Would you excuse me, Denise?”
She was nonplussed. “Why—yes—if—”
He looked at his watch. “I’ve rented a glass-bottomed boat for eight o’clock. To have a look at the night life out on the reef.”
The night was when the reef came alive. The little coral creatures awoke and unfolded their brilliant little tentacles; phosphorescent organisms began to glow; octopuses and eels came out of their dark crannies to forage for their meals; sharks and rays and other big predators set forth on the hunt. You could take a boat out there that was equipped with bottom-mounted arc lights and watch the show, but very few of the hotel guests actually did. The waters that were so crystalline and inviting by day looked ominous and menacing in the dark, with sinister coral humps rising like black ogres’ heads above the lapping wavelets. She had never even thought of going.
But now she heard herself saying, in a desperate attempt at salvaging something out of the evening, “Can I go with you?”
“I’m sorry. No.”
“I’m really eager to see what the reef looks like at—”
“No,” he said, quietly but with real finality. “It’s something I’d rather do by myself, if you don’t mind. Or even if you do mind, I have to tell you. Is that all right, Denise?”
“Will I see you afterward?” she asked, wishing instantly that she hadn’t. But he had already risen. He gave her a gentlemanly little smile of farewell and strode down the terrace toward the steps that led to the beachfront promenade.
She stared after him, astounded by the swiftness of his disappearance, the unexpectedness of it.
She sat almost without moving, contemplating her bewildering abandonment. Five minutes went by, maybe ten. The waiter unobtrusively brought her another coffee. She held the cup in her hand without drinking from it.
Jeffrey Thompkins materialized from somewhere, hideously cheerful. “If you’re free,” he said, “how about an after-dinner liqueur?” He was wearing a white dinner jacket, very natty, and sharply pressed black trousers. But his round neckless head and the blaze of sunburn across his bare scalp spoiled the elegant effect. “A Strega, a Galliano, a nice cognac, maybe?” He pronounced it “cone-yac.”
“Something weird’s going on,” she said.
“Oh?”
“He went out on the reef in one of those boats, by himself. Holt. Just got up and walked away from the table, said he’d rented a boat for eight o’clock. Poof. Gone.”
“I’m heartbroken to hear it.”
“No, be serious. He was acting really strange. I asked to go with him, and he said no, I absolutely couldn’t. He sounded almost like some sort of machine. You could hear the gears clicking.”
Thompkins said, all flippancy gone from his voice now, “You think he’s going to do something to himself out there?”
“No. Not him. That’s one thing I’m sure of.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“A guy like that, all keyed up all the time and never letting on a thing to anybody—” Thompkins looked at her closely. “You know him better than I do. You don’t have any idea what he might be up to?”
“Maybe he just wants to see the reef. I don’t know. But he seemed so peculiar when he left—so rigid, so focused—”
“Come on,” Thompkins said. “Let’s get one of those boats and go out there ourselves.”
“But he said he wanted to go alone.”
“Screw what he said. He don’t own the reef. We can go for an expedition too, if we want to.”
It took a few minutes to arrange things. “You want a guided tour, sah?” the boy down at the dock asked, but Thompkins said no, and helped Denise into the boat as easily as though she were made of feathers. The boy shook his head. “Nobody want a guide tonight. You be careful out dere, stay dis side of the reef, you hear me, sah?”
Thompkins switched on the lights and took the oars. With quick, powerful strokes he moved away from the dock. Denise looked down. There was nothing visible below but the bright white sand of the shallows, a few long-spined sea urchins, some starfish. As they approached the reef, a hundred yards or so off shore, the density of marine life increased: schools of brilliant fishes whirled and dived, a somber armada of squids came squirting past.
There was no sign of Holt. “We ought to be able to see his lights,” Denise said. “Where can he have gone?”
Thompkins had the boat butting up against the flat side of the reef now. He stood up carefully and stared into the night.
“The crazy son of a bitch,” he muttered. “He’s gone outside the reef! Look, there he is.”
He pointed. Denise, half rising, saw nothing at first; and then there was the reflected glow of the other boat’s lights, on the far side of the massive stony cluster and intricacy that was the reef. Holt had found one of the passageways through and was coasting along the reef’s outer face, where the deep-water hunters came up at night, the marlins and swordfish and sharks.
“What the hell does he think he’s doing?” Thompkins asked. “Don’t he know it’s dangerous out there?”
“I don’t think that worries him,” said Denise.
“So you do think he’s going to do something to himself.”
“Just the opposite. He knows that he’ll be all right out there, or he wouldn’t be there. He wouldn’t have gone if he saw any real risk in it.”
“Unless risk is what he’s looking for.”
“He doesn’t live in a world of risk,” she said. “He’s got a kind of sixth sense. He always knows what’s going to happen next.”
“Huh?”
Words came pouring out of her. “He can see the future,” she said fiercely, not caring how wild it sounded. “It’s like an open book to him. How do you think he does that trick with the turtles?”
“Huh?” Thompkins said again. “The future?” He peered at her, shaking his head slowly.
Then he swung sharply around as if in response to some unexpected sound from the sea. He shaded his forehead with his hand, the way he might have done if he were peering into bright sunlight. After a moment he pointed into the darkness beyond the reef and said in a slow awed tone, “What the fuck! Excuse me. But Jesus, will you look at that?”
She stared past him, toward the suddenly foaming sea.
Something was happening on the reef’s outer face. Denise saw it unfolding as if i
n slow motion. The ocean swelling angrily, rising, climbing high. The single great wave barrelling in as though it had traveled all the way from Alaska for this one purpose. The boat tilting up on end, the man flying upward and outward, soaring gracefully into the air, traveling along a smooth curve like an expert diver and plummeting down into the black depths just beside the reef’s outer face. And then the last curling upswing of the wave, the heavy crash as it struck the coral wall.
In here, sheltered by the reef, they felt only a mild swaying, and then everything was still again.
Thompkins clapped his hand over his mouth. His eyes were bulging. “Jesus,” he said after a moment. “Jesus! How the fuck am I going to get out there?” He turned toward Denise. “Can you row this thing back to shore by yourself?”
“I suppose so.”
“Good. Take it in and tell the boat boy what happened. I’m going after your friend.”
He stripped with astonishing speed, the dinner jacket, the sharply creased pants, the shirt and tie, the black patent leather shoes. Denise saw him for a moment outlined against the stars, the fleshy burly body hidden only by absurd bikini pants in flamboyant scarlet silk. Then he was over the side, swimming with all his strength, heading for one of the openings in the reef that gave access to the outer face.
She was waiting among the crowd on the shore when Thompkins brought the body in, carrying it like a broken doll. He had been much too late, of course. One quick glance told her that Holt must have been tossed against the reef again and again, smashed, cut to ribbons by the sharp coral, partly devoured, even, by the creatures of the night. Thompkins laid him down on the beach. One of the hotel boys put a blanket over him; another gave Thompkins a robe. He was scratched and bloody himself, shivering, grim-faced, breathing in windy gusts. Denise went to him. The others backed away, stepping back fifteen or twenty feet, leaving them alone, strangely exposed, beside the blanketed body.
“Looks like you were wrong,” Thompkins said. “About that sixth sense of his. Or else it wasn’t working so good tonight.”
“No,” she said. For the past five minutes she had been struggling to put together the pattern of what had happened, and it seemed to her now that it was beginning to come clear. “It was working fine. He knew this would happen.”
“What?”
“He knew. Like I said before, he knew everything ahead of time. Everything. Even this. But he went along with it anyway.”
“But if he knew everything, then why… why…” Thompkins shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
Denise shuddered in the warm night breeze. “No, you don’t. You can’t. Neither can I.”
“Miss Carpentah?” a high, strained voice called. “Mistah Thompkins?”
It was the night manager, Mr. Eubanks of the dazzling grin, belatedly making his way down from the hotel. He wasn’t grinning now. He looked stricken, panicky, strangely pasty-faced. He came to a halt next to them, knelt, picked up one corner of the beach blanket, stared at the body beneath it as though it were some bizarre monster that had washed ashore. A guest had died on his watch, and it was going to cost him, he was sure of that, and his fear showed in his eyes.
Thompkins, paying no attention to the Jamaican, said angrily to Denise, “If he knew what was going to happen, if he could see the fucking future, why in the name of Christ didn’t he simply not take the boat out, then? Or if he did, why fool around outside the reef where it’s so dangerous? For that matter, why didn’t he just stay the hell away from Jamaica in the first place?”
“That’s what I mean when I tell you that we can’t understand,” she said. “He didn’t think the way we do. He wasn’t like us. Not at all. Not in the slightest.”
“Mistah Thompkins—Miss Carpentah—if you would do me de courtesy of speaking with me for a time—of letting me have de details of dis awful tragedy—”
Thompkins brushed Eubanks away as if he were a gnat.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying,” he told Denise.
Eubanks said, exasperated, “If de lady and gemmun will give me deir kind attention, please—”
He looked imploringly toward Denise. She shook him off. She was still groping, still reaching for the answer.
Then, for an instant, just for an instant, everything that was going on seemed terribly familiar to her. As if it had all happened before. The warm, breezy night air. The blanket on the beach. The round, jowly, baffled face of Jeffrey Thompkins hovering in front of hers. Mr. Eubanks, pale with dismay. An odd little moment of déjà vu. It appeared to go on and on. Now Eubanks will lose his cool and try to grab me by the arm, she thought; now I will pull back and slip on the sand; now Jeffrey will catch me and steady me. Yes. Yes. And here it comes. “Please, you may not ignore me dis way! You must tell me what has befallen dis unfortunate gemmum!” That was Eubanks, eyes popping, forehead shiny with sweat. Making a pouncing movement toward her, grabbing for her wrist. She backed hastily away from him. Her legs felt suddenly wobbly. She started to sway and slip, and looked toward Thompkins. But he was already coming forward, reaching out toward her to take hold of her before she fell. Weird, she thought. Weird.
Then the weirdness passed, and everything was normal again, and she knew the answer.
That was how it had been for him, she thought in wonder. Every hour, every day, his whole goddamned life.
“He came to this place and he did what he did,” she said to Thompkins, “because he knew that there wasn’t any choice for him. Once he had seen it in his mind it was certain to happen. So he just came down here and played things through to the end.”
“Even though he’d die?” Thompkins asked. He looked at Denise stolidly, uncomprehendingly.
“If you lived your whole life as if it had already happened, without surprise, without excitement, without the slightest unpredictable event, not once, not ever, would you give a damn whether you lived or died? Would you? He knew he’d die here, yes. So he came here to die, and that’s the whole story. And now he has.”
“Jesus,” Thompkins said. “The poor son of a bitch!”
“You understand now? What it must have been like for him?”
“Yeah,” he said, his arm still tight around her as though he didn’t mean to ever let go. “Yeah. The poor son of a bitch.”
“I got to tell you,” said Mr. Eubanks, “dis discourtesy is completely improper. A mahn have died here tragically tonight, and you be de only witnesses, and I ask you to tell me what befell, and you—”
Denise closed her eyes a moment. Then she looked at Eubanks.
“What’s there to say, Mr. Eubanks? He took his boat into a dangerous place and it was struck by a sudden wave and overturned. An accident. A terrible accident. What else is there to say?” She began to shiver. Thompkins held her. In a low voice she said to him, “I want to go back to my cottage.”
“Right,” he said. “Sure. You wanted a statement, Mr. Eubanks? There’s your statement. Okay? Okay?”
He held her close against him and slowly they started up the ramp toward the hotel together.
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