An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

  “So.…”

  “So, the only plausible explanation is that she got away.” Will cocaine, marijuana, and beer render the specious plausible? DeWalt waited, smiling.

  “But how? I mean she’s naked, right? She didn’t even have any shoes on.”

  “The way I figure it, Rodney, is that the moment Alex was shot, Jeri scrambled out of the car and into the woods. Whoever pulled the trigger would need at least a half-minute to reload, which would give her a sufficient headstart. So she’s running through the woods, she’s pretty fast because she’s scared to death, and eventually the murderer has to give up and get his ass out of there. He can’t spend all day chasing after her, right? Not unless he wants to take the chance of being caught.”

  “So where do you think she is?”

  “Wait a minute, there’s another scenario to consider too. The only person to realistically suspect of having the kind of gun that Alex was shot with, is Alex himself. So there’s also the possibility that Jeri shot Alex. Maybe by accident. Maybe not.”

  “I can’t believe that,” Gillen said.

  “Actually, the question of who killed Alex isn’t the important thing here. The important thing is, how did a naked barefoot girl escape without a trace?”

  “That’s exactly what I’d like to know.”

  “It’s obvious. Somebody helped her.”

  “Somebody who?”

  “Somebody she knew. Somebody she knew very well. Somebody she’d recognize on sight who just happened to come along at the right time. Somebody she trusted and was comfortable with. Maybe somebody she wanted to be with all the time instead of being with an old man who couldn’t keep up with her, or with a husband who had, shall we say, certain sexual preferences that she didn’t find particularly fulfilling. A husband she had already tried to leave on at least one occasion.”

  DeWalt cut a quick glance at Craig Fox, who was sitting stiffly upright now, eyes wide and disbelieving, head moving slowly back and forth. Then DeWalt looked at Gillen. Gillen sat leaning to his right, staring hard past the mast at a speechless Fox.

  “It would have to be somebody smart enough to seize upon all the possibilities of the situation,” DeWalt said. “Somebody who could afford to buy her a new set of clothes and then put her up in a motel somewhere until he could move her to a safer place. Somebody who, if he wanted her husband caught, and crucified, might actually lead an investigator to his hide-out.”

  There were more holes in DeWalt’s story than there had been in Bonnie and Clyde’s corpses but neither Gillen nor Fox was counting.

  “That’s crazy,” Craig Fox muttered. Then louder, more adamant, “You’re crazy, you know that? You’ve gone fucking crazy, man.”

  DeWalt kept smiling. He had one hand on the rudder and one on the boom. It was such a clear and promising night, he felt twenty years old again.

  Gillen, like Fox, was slowly shaking his head back and forth. To DeWalt they looked like a pair of novelty bookends. Then Gillen gradually rose to his feet. He lost his balance for a moment, set the beer bottle on the deck, and stood erect once more. He steadied himself by holding to the mast with his left hand. Still shaking his head, still negating some thought or misconception, he raised his right hand and the thing it held, he lifted a stiffly-extended arm until the revolver was leveled at Fox’s chest.

  Here it is, DeWalt. Now you either beg God to save you or you defy Him to destroy you. You demand a validation of existence through either compassion or cruelty, it does not matter which, either response is a declaration of being. It is now you force His hand.

  DeWalt swung the boom hard to his right and at the same instant propelled himself backward, rolling over the low rail and filling his lungs and slapping harshly into the water. “Hey!” he heard, and grinned, it seemed such a funny thing to say.

  For the first few moments his heart rebels. His chest hammers for oxygen, heart clattering, sensing death. The chill of the water goes straight to his blood and his blood turns as dark as the water, as thick as the darkness. Instinct orders him to fight for the surface, push up, break out and gulp the air, but he subdues this instinct somehow, this clawing animal. He turns not toward the stars but toward the center of the earth, pushes deeper into the chill and the darkness and whatever hope they conceal.

  He is drifting down; falling, he imagines, like a large heavy bird with wings outspread. Where is the gravity here? he wonders. Where the density and the grasping roots of fear? The water is cold and its darkness blinds him. He hears a humorous sound, doink! doink! That almost metallic report of bullets entering water. There is another muffled noise too but he can not isolate it, everything is everywhere and everything is nowhere, he thinks he might like to be a fish someday, he hopes the Hindus are right and he will someday get the chance.

  He falls for maybe seven seconds and then feels the momentum change; the downward movement slows; stops. He does not want to start floating upward yet so he kicks his legs out straight and he scoops the water past him, pulls himself forward, swimming blind. He pictures himself plowing into a submerged tree. Conking his head on a sunken Buick, a fantailed American frigate. He swims as hard and as fast as he can through the chilling water and he has no idea in which direction he is headed.

  And soon his lungs are burning, he must surface now. Noiselessly he rises, barely fluttering his hands, rising on the body’s own buoyancy, its natural willingness to levitate. Rising in plenty of time so as not to have to gasp for air when he breaks the surface, the earth’s hymen. Either he will take a bullet to the forehead or he will be all right. Life is very simple now. He wishes this moment could last forever. He isn’t sure but he suspects that he has an erection.

  The first thing he saw was the moon. He saw it from underwater as it floated above him, an undulating balloon of an egg. The moment his eyes broke the surface the egg retreated, solidified, gelled.

  Get your bearings, DeWalt. Wake up or die.

  He had no trouble staying afloat. Body fat saves the day, he thought. The air was cold on his eyes and forehead, his body warmer for a change. Water trickling from his hair blurred his vision but he could not risk wiping it away, making any anomalous splash no matter how small, and so he blinked in double time, scanning all that lay before him, a hundred and eighty degrees of darkness. On the left edge of his peripheral vision were several tiny lights—Chelton. To his right, nothing.

  So he had emerged on the sailboat’s starboard, he had his back to it. Would he turn just in time to se the grin on Gillen’s face as he leaned over the rail, the pistol’s fulminating red blink? DeWalt could take a breath and dive, swim for the shore, or push his luck no further and maybe accept this gesture from God as—

  “… just wait and fucking see.”

  That was Gillen’s voice he heard. Over his right shoulder. The boat drifting closer, the boy muttering, pacing the deck. “… sonsabitches think I won’t let you drown I will. I’ll shoot you in the fucking water you assholes if you don’t get back here right now this fucking minute!”

  With a flutter of his left hand DeWalt did a quarter turn. Gillen had sounded not angry but terrified. The muffled splash DeWalt heard earlier had been the sound of Craig Fox abandoning ship. He was probably halfway to the western shore by now, sped by abject fear. So Gillen was alone on the boat, helpless. He knew nothing about sails and wind and in an instant his hopes had been deflated, became an empty canvas, a rudderless drift.

  DeWalt watched the boat for a moment, its shadowed profile against a less-dark sky; he calculated its drift in relation to his. Gillen moved slowly around the deck, crabbing close to the rail, sliding against it, afraid to let go, the pistol scraping the chrome as he peered into the ink.

  Again DeWalt filled his lungs. He pulled his palms up from hips to chest and sank below the surface and swam toward the boat. God could keep his petty gestures; a gesture wasn’t enough. It would not be enough either to prove or to solve anything or to get yourself killed. But to force God’s hand mi
ght come closer to enough. It might be as much of enough as is humanly allowed.

  DeWalt did not really care which way it worked out. In the final end what would it matter? All that really mattered was the demonstration, the resistance; or maybe the belief in the illusion that it mattered.

  He came to the surface but did not have time for a full breath because Gillen was moving aft along the port side, walking directly toward DeWalt who had emerged a few yards behind the boat. DeWalt pulled himself under again and swam forward. The movement of water dragged at the bag against his abdomen, tugged at the catheter where it entered his body.

  His hand touched the slippery hull now. He felt along its curve until he found the ladder. He held to the bottom rung without pulling on it, lightly kicking, holding his breath, counting the steps he imagined Gillen taking as he came to the stern and moved past it.

  When he could hold his breath no longer, he eased himself up, keeping the back of his head hard to the hull. Gillen stood directly above him, still muttering. His voice was clear for a moment but quickly changed in tone, became muted again as he turned and addressed the darkness on the starboard side.

  DeWalt drew his legs up until he could get both feet on the edge of the short ladder’s bottom rung. Reaching higher, he swung himself around as smoothly as he could. He felt the sailboat take his weight, felt the stern dip, and he knew that Gillen had felt it too, that Gillen in the next half-second would be turning to face him, pistol swinging toward him, and so he stood to his full height and leaning forward reached into the darkness to where he thought Gillen would be, where he hoped he would be, DeWalt’s right arm stretching and swinging up quick, fingers as splayed and stiff as the prongs of a grappling hook.

  Don’t grab air, he prayed.

  The moment his fingers met resistance they closed tight and pulled. DeWalt pushed his feet against the ladder, driving his torso backward. It seemed for an instant that he would lose his grip—he had grabbed Gillen’s shirt just below the boy’s left shoulder—but then the resistance broke and he went into the water on his back and he did not know if he had brought also Gillen or only Gillen’s shirt until he felt the heavy splash and heard Gillen’s startled cry filling with water.

  Three hard strokes, and DeWalt had dragged himself back to the sailboat. He put a foot on the ladder and climbed up. Behind him, Gillen was fiercely battling the water, pummeling it with open hands. He would bob forward a foot or two, scream “Help!” and go under, only to bob up and scream again. His arms never stopped flailing. He was afraid to lower his face and therefore kept his body nearly vertical, doing far more hopping than swimming, and as a consequence was under water at least half the time.

  DeWalt sat on the benchseat at the stern. His breath scraped in his throat, the air as abrasive as sandpaper. Gillen was making very slow progress but he seemed to be getting closer. DeWalt said, “You’ll never make it to shore, kid.”

  Gillen’s hands beat the water. “Throw me something!” he screamed, and went under.

  When the boy’s head bobbed into view again DeWalt told him, calmly, “Fuck you.”

  “I don’t have.… the gun man … help me!”

  “You don’t have a lot of things, Jack.”

  Gillen struggled forward, bobbing closer, gagging and spitting with every inch of progress. When he finally pulled himself close enough to consider reaching for the ladder, DeWalt moved the boom, filling the sail. The ladder drew away from Gillen’s fingertips.

  “Ahh jesus, please!” Gillen cried.

  “Aren’t the stars lovely tonight, Rodney?”

  “I’m going to drown here, man. For Christ’s sake!”

  “Okay, enough’s enough. Climb aboard.” DeWalt luffed the sail.

  Gillen clawed at the water until he dragged himself to the ladder again. Panting hard, wheezing, he began to pull himself up. DeWalt caught the tip of his chin with a crisp right jab.

  A few moments later, when Gillen bobbed to the surface, DeWalt told him. “Involuntary twitch, man. Like sorry, you know?”

  Gillen began to weep. Still slapping the water, kicking ineffectually, he sobbed convulsively, wave after wave of staccato wails.

  “All right, knock it off,” DeWalt said.

  Gillen’s misery echoed across the lake. DeWalt could hear it in the distant trees, a gathering of crows, a caucus of grief.

  “Knock it off,” he said, “and I’ll let you come aboard.”

  Gillen sniffed and quieted, he paddled hard. The moment his shoulders came level with the aft rail, DeWalt punched him again.

  This time when Gillen’s head bobbed to the surface, DeWalt was standing on the ladder. Holding to the rail with his left hand, he leaned toward the water and grasped Gillen by an arm. “Are you ready to dry out now, Rodney?” he asked.

  Gillen tried to nod but he was too weak to lift his head. His eyes rolled. Once again DeWalt struggled on board. He dragged Gillen along behind him, tugging and sliding him over the rail, and then dropped him shivering, a gaffed fish, onto the moon-speckled deck.

  DeWalt sat in the stern with one hand on the boom, one hand guiding the rudder. He sailed them toward the light. He tried not to shiver. He felt horribly alone.

  The next afternoon was as gray as the late hours of loneliness, the sky a rough concrete floor. DeWalt looked up at the sky and thought, If that floor falls in, we’re mush.

  He and Trooper Abbott were standing in the grass just off the rear entrance to the courthouse. They had walked there together from the jail across the street, where earlier that day, Gillen and Fox had been lodged, escorted by the State Policemen who had taken Gillen off DeWalt’s hands the night before. Abbott now lifted a panatella from his shirt pocket and, using a disposable plastic lighter, lit it up.

  “I never saw you smoke before,” said DeWalt. “I had you pegged as a man without a single nasty habit.”

  “I have maybe one of these a day. Usually at night.” He laid his head back and blew out a long stream of smoke. “You know how I feel right now, Ernie? The first thing I’m going to do when I get home, and I do mean the first thing, is to throw my wife into bed. I feel like I could screw all night.”

  DeWalt smiled. Thunder stumbled across the sky. To DeWalt it sounded like a crippled caged animal pacing behind its bars, waiting for the keeper to come to feed him, to slip a hand too far inside the cage.

  “You want one?” Abbott asked, meaning the cigar.

  DeWalt shook his head. “It’s been a strange summer, hasn’t it?

  “How so?”

  “Most days it’s felt more like October than August.”

  “You think today feels like October? It must be eighty-five degrees right now.”

  “I don’t mean the heat exactly. I mean the way the air feels. The way it smells.”

  Abbott laughed softly. “You writers,” he said.

  DeWalt could feel it coming now: something; some deep throaty growl of argument between them. Inevitable. Probably even necessary. With luck, cathartic.

  “I already thanked those boys from the Chelton barracks for showing up so fast last night,” DeWalt said. “But I’d appreciate it if you could pass the word along to the top. They didn’t waste a second.”

  “The times are all logged in, it’s part of the arrest report.” Abbott puffed twice on the cigar. He held the smoke in his mouth as if it were a sip of wine, rolling it over his tongue, savoring it, particularizing its virtues and flaws. Slowly then he exhaled. “What did you think, we were going to make you babysit all night?”

  DeWalt continued to gaze across the street at the jail’s front door. The door stood open, two troopers and a local deputy just inside the dim lobby. They were laughing about something, a joke or anecdote. Grinning mouths, teeth, bobbing heads—a pantomime of humor.

  “Where exactly did they pick up Fox?” he asked.

  “About a half mile up the road from his folks’ cottage. On his way back. The patrolcar pulls up alongside him and he throws his arms into
the air and yells, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I surrender!’” Abbott shook his head and laughed. “What a MacGuphie.”

  “That’s one I don’t know,” said DeWalt.

  “I made it up. A MacGuphie’s a machiavellian, greedy, parasitic, historically insignificant entity.”

  DeWalt smiled. “You cops,” he said. He regretted it the moment it left his lips.

  Abbott studied his cigar for a while. Finally he said, “That was one dumbass stunt you pulled, Ernie. Even just going into that cottage the way you did. I’d have thought you would know better.”

  “I’d have thought so too.”

  “You had no right to go in there, you know.”

  DeWalt kept quiet. It had to come out.

  “No fucking right at all. Why the hell didn’t you just go to a phone, Ernie? You think you’re some kind of a Superman or what?”

  “You’re right,” DeWalt said.

  “You think you can stop bullets with your bare hand? Make them bounce off your chest? You think you can’t get hurt?”

  “All right,” DeWalt said. “I agree with you, okay? I get the point.”

  Abbott looked down again, looked at the cigar burning in his hand. The coil of smoke drifted into DeWalt’s eyes. He moved half a step away and turned to the side, but still the smoke found its way to him, it fouled the shaded grass-tree scent of the courtyard, it darkened the air and troubled the stillness. DeWalt was conscious of a nauseating chill deep in his stomach, in the hollowed-out pit of his solitude.

  “Fucking amateurs,” the trooper said.

  DeWalt could have said something then and in fact considered it, he could have said that it took a fucking amateur to find them, didn’t it, to find them right under your noses not three miles from the Chelton barracks. But there was no profit to such a statement. Truth can drop you into the red just as capriciously as it can lift you into the black.