‘That soon,’ he repeated. ‘I’d had a few drinks, we got into an argument. He swung a fist at me, I swung back. He fell and never got up.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I panicked,’ Mick spluttered, tears streaming down his face. ‘I picked him up and put him in the boot of my car.’
‘DNA evidence,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘They’ll find Talbot’s DNA in the boot of my car. Anyway, I drove down the highway a bit, where those terrible rips are out at Shell Beach, and dumped him in the water.’
‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘Even if he is washed ashore, there won’t be much left of him.’
‘I can’t go to prison,’ he cried. ‘Do you know what they do to cops in jail?’
‘It was an accident. It wasn’t murder.’ I paused. ‘Look, you’re a good man. They’ll charge you with manslaughter. They’ll take it all into account and you’ll get a short sentence in a prison farm or something. You might even get off.’
He shook his head.
‘How did the detectives figure it was you?’
‘The can of spray paint,’ he said. ‘The kid who reported it told them there wasn’t any spray paint here when he found the open door.’
‘You put it there,’ I said. ‘A red herring.’
‘Yeah. I dumped it up there just before I came back for you.’ He stepped back a pace. ‘That was stupid of me.’
I stepped toward him.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ he roared over the rising wind. ‘I can’t bear the scandal. I can’t go to prison.’
I paused, spread my hands, then took another step. I felt the first, thick drops of rain on my face.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve been a good friend,’ then, ‘Goodbye!’
And before I could reach him, he turned and leaped off the cliff’s edge.
#
Mick Bowen’s body was recovered two days later. Of course, they found Talbot’s DNA in the boot of his car.
Chiltern and Holbrook interviewed me once more. This time they merely took a statement. They focused on everything that had occurred before he leaped to his death. Both detectives shook my hand. ‘Sorry to have put you through the previous interview, but we really couldn’t understand why he’d have taken you up to the site,’ said Holbrook. ‘Anyway, we honestly were trying to eliminate you as a suspect.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No harm done.’
Cops, huh?
About a month later, I was sitting in the pub, having lunch. A pint of ale and fish and chips once again. I’m a creature of habit.
‘I heard your house is up for sale,’ said Terry when he brought me my food.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s time to cast myself adrift.’
‘Where you going to?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet. I think I’ve stayed here too long. I’ve been stuck here. I should have left after Ellen died.’
‘Good luck,’ he said, and shook my hand. ‘We’ll miss you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘They’re gonna close the lighthouse down next month. They’re about to start installing the new solar light on the cliff.’
‘Yeah, I heard.’
‘It’s a shame,’ said Terry. ‘But you can understand why they’re doing it.’
I nodded. ‘You won’t be able to see it from the town anymore. The light, I mean. It’ll be mounted on the cliffs and pulse straight out to sea.’
‘I’ll miss seeing it up there, flashing every night. It was kind of comforting,’ he said. ‘Oh well, I suppose it won’t matter too much. Ships only run aground out at sea.’ He laughed.
‘Don’t be too sure.’ I smiled. ‘There are reefs everywhere.’
THE TOWER
B. T. Joy
They’d stopped on Winn Street, outside St. James. Ethan hadn’t broken his silence for a moment as he parked by the church and Laura knew better than to challenge his decision. At the best of times, when Ethan needed silence, he needed silence; and this wasn’t the best of times.
From here, they could both see the grey lines of Interstate 49 stretching clear back to Shreveport where it joined the roads that led on to Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi; or to anywhere, for that matter, but the place they were going.
Ethan touched his lips with his tongue.
Laura watched him quietly, quite aware of his tells by now, but conscious not to be the first to speak.
‘We’ve come too early,’ Ethan said at last, having wet his lips a few more times out of habit.
Laura looked at the dashboard clock. It was eight in the morning and they’d touched down in Alexandria International at around five-thirty. They’d stopped in the airport to eat. They’d checked out the condition of the rental car so many times that the agent flat out told Ethan he had better things to do. They’d driven as slowly as possible into the centre of the city. And all this without so much as exchanging two words between them.
‘We’ve got all the time you need,’ she told him. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
The morning sunlight was cool and yellow on the road in front of them. Up ahead, Ethan watched a Cooper’s hawk sail down onto a telephone pole, wait a moment, cock its head, fly off again.
He shivered visibly when Laura touched his arm.
‘Ethan.’ She did her best to maintain eye contact as he looked at her. ‘Do you want to talk?’
Ethan’s eyes grew less wide. He tried, unsuccessfully, to look less on edge. Then he shook his head and adjusted his body so Laura was no longer touching him.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he said flatly. ‘We’ve come too early is all. It wasn’t like this.’
Laura breathed out.
‘Ethan, you remember what Dr Braider said. We can’t fixate on details. It isn’t going to be the way it was. Things’ve changed. You’ve changed.’
Ethan just kept staring out the window. He wouldn’t close his eyes. Not while Laura was there. Not while she could see him. But he knew if he did, he’d have smelled the wild boneset flowers again and the lemon mint heating under rows of tomato plants. Then, brick dust and cobwebs strung out in the cool shade, stringing through his hair and slithering across the skin of his face.
He was thirty-two that year, and yet, still, whenever he closed his eyes, he was eleven years old again.
Nothing ever changed.
#
Laura tried not to see the eight block journey to the 4th Street motel as a retreat.
She’d suggested to Ethan that if, as he’d claimed, jet-lag was his only problem, then they could take the short drive to Marksville and find somewhere there to check in, have a bite to eat and a rest. Then they could set out again in the afternoon.
‘That was nearer the time,’ she’d said, ‘wasn’t it?’
She’d known she’d lost when Ethan started to bite his upper lip. For him, the Red River, running between Alexandria and Marksville, was not only a geographical but a psychological barrier. Really, she thought, while they rode back to the motel, she should’ve been giving him more leeway. This was the first time since he was a teenager that he’d gathered together enough guts to even return to the State of Louisiana. Christ, when they’d met, Laura had pegged him as a born-and-bred New Englander, just like herself. She’d been more than surprised to hear, after his second big breakdown, that, in reality, Ethan had been born and raised right here in Alexandria and spoke with a southern drawl until the age of sixteen.
It’s a form of self-deception, Dr Braider had told Ethan once, and Ethan had told Laura. If he doesn’t speak the way he did as a child, then maybe he wasn’t that child. Then, maybe, those awful things didn’t happen.
#
They pulled into the parking lot on the corner of 4th and Fisk Street.
Ethan let the engine die.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘I always told myself I wouldn’t drag you into this shit.’
‘Don’t talk like that, Ethan,’ she answered h
im. ‘You’re doing fine.’
He looked at her sceptically.
‘Come on, Laura. I can’t even cross the river.’
She grabbed his hand.
‘You will, though!’
‘Will I?’ He smiled weakly.
He looked down at her hand; holding his hand so sincerely.
‘When I look at you,’ he kept looking at their hands, unwilling or unable to make eye contact, ‘I see how successful you are. And how clever. And how pretty...’
‘Ethan, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Let me finish.’ He looked at her at last, shaking his head, ‘I just... I just can’t see why you’d want to spend so long dealing with my problems.’
She tightened her grip twice over on his hand and stared directly into his eyes.
‘They’re our problems, Ethan,’ she insisted, ‘and once we get over that river, once we get back to Marksville and see that place, you’re going to realise it can’t hurt you anymore.’
She saw him begin to bite his lip and pulled him into her to stop him.
She held his neck.
She kissed his ear.
‘You were a little boy, Ethan,’ she said. ‘You were a little boy when it happened.’
#
The tower had stood in a small farm back then. A mile or two outside of Marksville; between the bank of the Red River and a small flooded strip of grassy bog where families of wood ducks paddled and sailed; letting out their tall, sharp cries into the heavy afternoons.
It was stone-built, and its architecture showed Spanish and Sephardic influences which predated even the Louisiana Purchase. The local assumption therefore, passed down through generations with no actual archaeological evidence, was that it had been a lighthouse erected by La Salle and his men; after they’d claimed the river land for Louis XIV. Such structures had existed, it was true, but, then, being made of wood, they’d all rotted away centuries ago and fallen into the drink. Why had only that one been built from clean-cut stone? Why did it have characters, from some script foreign to Latin, engraved in arches around its doors and windows? And why had every entrance been walled up with blocks of material just as old as the edifice itself?
For Ethan and his friends from Alexandria, those questions presented an almost magnetic pull. All summer, the game was the same. Bike out of Alex along the Red River road to the bridge and down into the farm where the farmer never farmed. Where the rows of tomatoes and frowsy zucchinis co-existed with wild berries and tall stands of boneset crowned in fragrant white flower.
Every day, they’d lay their bikes in all that green smell and maunder. They’d throw off shirts and run, their jeans wet in the shallow of the river. They’d chase the wood ducks, then lie by the bank in the heavy heat and let the denim dry to their skins.
Sometimes, Ethan would walk around and around the tower, trying to imagine where the builder had laid the first stone. The graven symbols filled him with boyish wonder, and it wasn’t too long before he’d stay an extra quarter hour after his friends had decided to bike it back home.
Don’t worry about me, guys, he’d say. I’m right behind you.
But the time spent alone grew longer and longer. Whole hours staring up at the darkening sky with its blues and browns, and the height of the tower above his head.
After a while, he began bringing his Swiss army knife, the one his dad had bought him for his birthday that year, and, only ever when the other guys had left, he’d start to worry the longest of the blades between the rotten interstices of the stones — the stones that had been placed in the blocked-up entrances — almost as though someone were trying to keep him out.
#
Ethan woke in a strange bed and clawed off the blankets.
He rolled onto his stomach, choked, hawked, and spat on the motel room floor. Blood was running through the gaps between his teeth and slavering over his chin.
‘Ethan!’
The lights burst on and Ethan rolled pathetically onto his back like an upturned insect. Laura grabbed his arm and tried to pull him upright on the bed.
‘Ethan! It’s okay! You’ve just bitten yourself again!’
He spat up more blood and tried to wipe it away with the back of his hand.
‘It’s okay!’ Laura insisted.
She pulled him off the bed and led him off to the bathroom; him leaning his feeble weight on her shoulders the whole time.
Laura knew the drill. Hell, Ethan bled nearly every time he had the nightmare. Once, he’d driven his teeth so far into the flesh of his upper lip they’d had to take a trip to the emergency room that night, where he’d been given two butterfly stitches.
When they reached the washbasin, Ethan leaned down on it and Laura took the chance to twist on the water and grab a washcloth.
She held the rag under the flow, wrung it out, and then pressed it against her boyfriend’s face, staunching the red flow.
‘It’s okay,’ she whispered.
‘Fuck’s sake, Laura!’ Ethan pounded his fists on the stand. ‘Stop saying that!’
Laura looked concernedly into his face. His eyes were staring furiously into the mirror and, if she was truthful, the sound of anger in his voice had frightened her.
Ethan broke eye contact with himself in the glass and glanced at her. Her startled expression told him everything.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just... I just can’t stand this.’
Her feelings of concern turned back to feelings of sympathy; her default for so much of their relationship, and she began running the washcloth tenderly over his skin again.
#
The guy at reception gave the couple a strange look when they re-emerged into the lobby of that 4th Street Super 8. They’d only checked in a matter of hours ago, and now they were checking back out and him with bloodstains all down the front of his white flannel shirt.
Laura made no reference to Ethan’s condition as she signed them out. What could she say? Sometimes, my boyfriend’s dreams are so intense he bites his own lips until they bleed?
No. Better just to let the receptionist imagine whatever sordid, motel, bloodplay sex game he thought they’d engaged in and have done with it.
When they finally got back on the road, Ethan agreed that Laura should drive.
‘I don’t think I can do it myself,’ he said. ‘I need you.’
As they made their way back to Winn Street, Laura thought about that. About how much Ethan needed her. She’d be with him always if she could. But how can you be there for someone in his nightmares?
‘How far did you get?’ she asked after a short silence.
‘What do you mean?’ Ethan replied.
‘In the nightmare. How far did you get?’
He shook his head.
‘I... I don’t remember.’
It’s a form of self-deception, Laura. She heard Dr Braider’s voice. By this time, Ethan is very skilled in self-deception. He can repress any memory he wants.
‘You do remember!’ Laura insisted. Then she glanced at him in the rear view mirror. ‘Ethan, please. Tell me.’
She could see tears starting in Ethan’s boyish eyes and his red, crusty lips were shuddering.
‘I remember the smell,’ he said, ‘the boneset and that... that sick lemony smell... I remember the light on the water and the wood ducks screaming...’
He stopped.
‘Go on,’ Laura prompted.
He stared ahead. They were passing St. James; making their way onto Route 167, which ghosted the Red River straight into Marksville.
‘I’m digging away a stone from the entrance.’ Ethan was entranced, almost back in the dream. ‘After a while, it just slides away in my hands. I can see the inside through the hole that’s left and I can smell this smell... like brick dust and cobwebs... like unwashed skin...’
He looked at her self-consciously.
‘I don’t want to go on,’ he said.
‘Ethan.’
‘Please, Laura.’ He look
ed at his lap.
Self-deception, Laura thought. All self-deception.
She glanced at him one more time then fixed her eyes on the road ahead. She kept driving.
#
They passed through Effie around noon and then crossed the river for the last time.
The high sun flashed like bashed gold across a long and flooded stretch of grass, and once they had crossed the bridge, Laura parked in a small lay-by that ran alongside an extinct vegetable farm.
‘We’re here,’ she said, and then she let the silence hang in the air.
Ethan’s eyes were closed and his face was tucked into his chest.
Inside the darkness, behind his eyelids, Laura knew he was seeing it all afresh. Himself, at eleven, squirming in through the hole he’d wheedled out of the ancient masonry. How he got soot and damp soil on his after-school clothes as he pushed inside and crawled out from under the wall onto a spiral staircase that led to an attic room, high above the tomato farm; a space that no other human soul had seen in nearly three-hundred years.
Maybe it had been a lighthouse once; calling ships inexorably down the black rivers of seventeenth century Louisiana; and, later, and just as inexorably, calling Ethan’s boyhood body upward into that claustrophobic loft.
She took his hand.
‘You don’t need to open your eyes until you want to, Ethan,’ she whispered, ‘but I’m looking at it now.’
She couldn’t see it well, just a straight and largely unremarkable grey shape among the green flood banks. Nothing you wouldn’t drive by a hundred times without noticing. She almost laughed. Was this really the centre of all his suffering?
‘It’s just a tower, Ethan.’ She smiled.
Then she looked at him. He was trembling; slowly and softly nibbling at his upper lip.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, leaning in, holding his neck, kissing his ear. ‘It’s okay.’
‘I’m scared,’ he stammered.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘but it never happened, Ethan. What you always say happened. What you dream happening. It never happened like that.’
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