Winter Tides

by James P. Blaylock

  “No.”

  “Are you lying to me, Ray? I think you are.”

  “No, hell no,” Mifflin said.

  “Because if you are, Ray, I’m going to light this couch on fire right now. I’m going to soak the couch with lamp oil and light it on fire. We’ll have Mifflin on the barby.”

  “I didn’t say anything to anybody,” Mifflin gasped. “I just got the hell out. I found out about the car and Mayhew and got out. I just wanted out.”

  “I get the point, Ray. You wanted out.” Dalton laughed out loud. He crumpled up the paper with the phone number on it and threw it on the floor. “That was my little IQ test, by the way—giving you the Mastercard and the driver’s license back. I had a great deal of fun with that. I followed you all over town, Ray, out to Long Beach, down to Laguna. You were putting the pieces together, puzzling things out like a private eye. You were a busy man, Ray, a busy man, you and your handful of weeds. I’ll admit, though, your phone call last night took me by surprise. I had actually come to believe that you were an honest man, and then the phone rang, and there you were trying to extort an extra ten thousand out of me. I said to myself, ‘This is not the Ray Mifflin I know.’ Greed had worked its magic on you, and I determined right then to plan out a way to undo the damage that the easy money had done.

  “Anyway, when you hit the bank this morning, I knew for certain what Ray Mifflin was up to. ‘Ray Mifflin is running,’ I told myself, and I drove right on down here to the Mifflin hacienda to prepare my little surprise. You didn’t give me much time, either. You’ve got a hell of a lead foot. I got down here about a half hour earlier than you did. I walked in through the garage and—wham!—something wonderful happened: in the darkness I kicked this full can of lamp oil. I’ve already told you about chance and intuition, Ray. Things come to us out of the darkness when we leave ourselves open to them, and this can of lamp oil was like that. It spoke to me, Ray. I had a mental image of a man in flames, and I knew that man was you, and that the flames were in this red-and-white can.

  “What I didn’t know was what I was going to do with Mr. Mayhew’s head, which was in need of immediate attention. Mr. Mayhew, as you yourself know, smells even worse dead than alive. Should I put the head in the steamer trunk and hide myself under the bed? Or should I put the head in the bed and hide myself in the trunk? Now, all else being equal, I would favor putting the head in the trunk, because I’ve always liked the idea of leaving little gifts for people in clever little ways, and the trunk suggests itself for that, don’t you think? A gift box for Ray Mifflin?”

  Mifflin had closed his eyes again, and he had started to sweat profusely. “Nod your head if you’re listening, Ray! Good!” he said, when Mifflin nodded. “Anyway, there you were, coming through the door, and I had to make my decision quick. ‘Head in the bed,’ I thought, and I realized it rhymed. It was just like kicking that can in the dark garage. It was right. It was artistically copacetic. So I decided that in your case I’d be the little gift, Ray. I’m proud of that decision, too. It was extremely effective, I think. Very artistic, the way it was timed. How about you? Did you find it artistic?”

  He bent down and flicked Mifflin’s ear hard enough to make the man’s eyes shoot open. Suddenly Mifflin went rigid, arching his back, putting all of his strength into breaking free of the cords that tied him to the couch. The pain in his shoulder contorted his face. Clearly he wasn’t up to breaking anything. Given a little time he might wiggle his way loose, if he had the backbone to see it through.

  “By the way, I found out where they buried Hoffa,” Edmund told him, making another slight adjustment to the turkey candle. “It was in New York, in Giants Stadium, under the goal posts. Do you know what they did to him, Ray? What they did to Hoffa?”

  He waited patiently now for Mifflin to shake his head. “They cut him into pieces with a chain saw and carried him away in suitcases. Those suitcases became his coffin. This house, quite frankly, might well be your coffin, Ray. Before the hour is through, you stand a chance of being consumed by your own birthright. But just between you and me, I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. I haven’t thought that part through yet. Think of it: your life hangs in the delicate balance at this very moment.”

  In the relative silence that followed, the ticking of the clock reminded Edmund that it was getting on toward dusk. The living room was even heavier with gloom now that evening was falling, and in another hour, out here on these lonely bluffs, the interior of the house would be utterly dark. The white sheets draped over the furniture already shone in the waning daylight like pale, hovering ghosts. Edmund felt something uncanny in the still air of the room, and he blinked his eyes slowly, concentrating, focusing. He moved slowly to the camera on the tripod. There was something … a presence in the room, a familiar presence.

  He studied the dim room. It seemed to him that there were moth-flutters of movement in the deeper shadows, back amid the heavy wooden furniture, and he moved the camera lens toward it, backing the zoom away to open the lens up full. From the corner of his eye he saw what looked like the brief tremble of a veil blowing across a dark doorway. He tilted his head, searching the edge of his vision, sweeping his mind clear almost without effort now, holding himself utterly still and calling her to him across the infinite dimension of darkness. There was a shimmering motion, almost like falling glitter, near a shuttered window, and then, for a moment, for just the blink of an eye, she moved in the darkness near the fireplace—the Night Girl’s shadowy silhouette against the heavy white plaster of the hearth. He aimed the camera at her, not daring to look through the viewfinder.

  He closed his eyes and pictured her face, the curve of her shoulders, her black hair. She was with him again at last, a collaborator, as she had been with him when he had worked with the man who had been Mayhew, who had impersonated his own father. “Yes,” he said out loud, affirming his faith in her, in the two of them. “Come with me…” It was time to decide Ray Mifflin’s fate, time to bring this to a close. He angled the camera toward the couch again, then picked up a book of matches from a ceramic dish on the mantel. The face of the cardboard matchbook was blank; it told him nothing. He looked around, searching for guidance in the room—a sign, a symbol.

  Mifflin was staring at him wide-eyed, shaking his head. Without speaking, Edmund picked up the can of lamp oil and carefully doused the couch and the area rug that the table sat on, then poured a pool of the liquid in the baking dish, dribbling it out onto the coffee table before setting the can down again. The lamp oil had a lemon and kerosene smell that masked the corrupt smell of Mayhew’s head. The five twenties floated on the surface of the oil, miraculously maintaining the precise symmetry of their arrangement. The wick of the candle thrust up out of the middle of the turkey’s back, waiting for the touch of a match. The clock ticked, the minute hand turning toward six o’clock, the day almost exactly three-quarters gone. Edmund Dalton breathed rhythmically, trancelike, clearing his mind of mental debris, feeling the nearness of the Night Girl, her spirit seeping into him, filling him.

  “How old are you, Ray Mifflin?” He asked the question in a monotone, careful not to break the springlike tension in the air, staring straight before him, the room having lost dimension, the sound of the clock shutting out all other sound.

  He knew that Mifflin was watching him, that the man was lost and waiting, but he didn’t meet Mifflin’s terror-filled eyes. And he wouldn’t meet them—he wanted no distraction, not until he had determined the man’s fate.

  He repeated his question—that evening’s key to the puzzle of life and death. “How old are you, Ray Mifflin?”

  “Sixty,” Mifflin whispered, heaving an impossibly deep breath.

  Sixty. The word was inevitable. Dalton had sensed it. Somehow it had come to him a moment ago, hidden in the ticking of the clock. He focused again on the clock face. The minute hand touched the twelve now; the hour hand rested solidly on the six. So just as three-quarters of the day had passed, three-qua
rters of Mifflin’s life had gone the same way. There was a perfect parallel, a true synchronicity.

  Yes.

  He heard the affirming voice in his mind, like the wind whispering.

  As the last sibilant fragments of the word faded into the darkness, he stood up slowly, shrugging his shoulders, shaking the trance out of his head. He breathed deeply, looking at Mifflin. Sometimes there was more power in letting a weak man live than in killing a strong man. He held up the matchbook so that Mifflin could see it, and then tossed it down onto the five twenties floating in the tray. The bills drifted apart. The minute hand of the clock jumped forward, time running on into the close of day.

  “Bon voyage, Ray. I wish you a good life down here in Mexico. I think you should stay here. Fm going to let you keep most of your money, by the way, and Fm going to let you keep Mr. Mayhew’s head. It’s served its purpose, and I can’t stand the smell of it. I truly believe that you did not call Mr. Davey Jones. And that means that you didn’t try to betray me, although you could have. You kept the faith, and I appreciate that; I truly do. I appreciate it so much that Fm going to forgive you for trying to take more than your share of the pie. It was a big piece of pie, Ray, for a little man like you. But Fm a man of my word. I’m going to let you keep it. Fm not even going to charge you a fee for driving down here, because it really has been fun. And let me tell you one last thing. Money is not the issue with me, Ray. It never has been. Fm an artist. Some artists work on canvas or clay; I work on people. I reshape their lives. Sometimes I reshape their physical forms. You might say that my audience is my medium. It’s the purest form of art, Ray, and you’ve been a part of it.”

  He looked around one last time, realizing that the Night Girl was gone. He was through here. He stared out through the shutters at the empty evening. There were lights on in the neighboring house, but it was a quarter mile away; nobody would see him leave. He realized that he felt very damned good, very fit and sharp. The dark shrubbery stood out in perfect clarity beyond the window, and he perceived every leaf and twig and branch as if he were studying an artist’s rendering, as if finally he could truly see. The distant lights along the bluffs shone like personal beacons, and he was brimming with inspiration, with the essential rightness that had come into his world. He looked down on Mifflin now as if from an eminence, a height that he had been ascending these last few weeks. He knew that he was nearly, but not quite, to the peak.

  Suddenly he thought about the long drive home in the rented car. He had the false I.D. and credit cards in his wallet, and he saw himself driving back up the freeway into southern California, basking in the utter and complete freedom of a man with an assumed identity. He picked up the camera and the tripod and went out through the front door, leaving Ray Mifflin once again the master of his own forever altered fate.

  54

  EDMUND’S ROOM AT THE MT. PLEASANT MOTOR HOTEL on Beach Boulevard was only a block down from Right Now Notary. It had obviously been furnished twenty or thirty years ago. The rust-orange shag carpet had been vacuumed, but the vacuuming hadn’t helped, and the seascape painting on the wall was straight out of a thrift store. When he had arrived two mornings ago, he had moved the painting into the closet and then had slid the dresser aside in order to expose the white-painted wall. The fleabag rooms were semidetached and rentable by the month—not the sort of place a tourist would check into. Unlike an authentic motel, there were no maids wheeling carts up and down outside the room, and he had made it clear to the management that he didn’t want to be disturbed. Best of all, the Mt. Pleasant was a place where tenants had long ago put a lid on their curiosity. His relationship with the Night Girl was stronger than ever since he had dealt with Mayhew and Mifflin, and what he needed now was to be left alone with her when he chose to be alone. He had been fairly successful in capturing her image on film, although the results were shadowy and indistinct. He had read that primitive people feared that a photograph would steal a man’s soul, and he was convinced that under the right conditions there might be a certain truth in the idea. Voodoo priests, certainly, saw a similar magic in a photographic image and the image represented by a cloth doll. A photograph of the Night Girl, at the very least, demonstrated that something increasingly permanent had come into existence at his bidding. And yet she was still merely a figment of his passions. Something prevented her from being fully realized, from having existence beyond his own desires, and he knew what that something was.

  The Day Girl and the Night Girl were meant to be one, not two. Anne’s stubborn attachment to the Day Girl persona was a closed door. What to do to open that door, or simply to obliterate it: that was the very interesting problem.

  In the time since his return from Mexico he’d had a vague sense of impending trouble. There was something in the air, and he had sensed it right away when he had passed into Orange County. The elevated mood provided by his successes with Mayhew and Mifflin had evaporated like the foggy spring weather. He felt slightly edgy now, and he found himself constantly checking the street past the heavy window curtains, half expecting to see a police car slowing down to turn into the tree-shaded lot. What he wanted now was a clarity of focus, but despite reading and meditation, he couldn’t quite maintain it.

  He also wanted to clean out the condo, especially to dismantle the darkroom and retrieve the stuff from the library. That was something he should have done before driving down to Mexico. He found these days that he quickly lost interest in his own films and photos; the thrill was in the process, as it was for any artist; and when the process was complete, his eyes were on the next piece, figuratively speaking. His collected work, like the work of any artist, was meant to affect an audience, but as the creator of a piece, he couldn’t also be an audience to it. One way or another, he shouldn’t have left the films lying around in his apartment. It was simply incriminating, and the sooner he found a market for them, the better. The next couple of days were going to be busy.

  He gathered up the odds and ends on the table in order to put them into the trunk of his rented car: an extension cord, a cheap plastic drop cloth, a ten-dollar lamp timer from the dime store, a light-bulb socket with a cord, and a hundred-watt bulb with a hole punched into the top of it to expose the intact filament, which would heat up to over a thousand degrees when the bulb was screwed into the socket and plugged in. All together the cheap collection would make a simple incendiary timer, and out of that simplicity would come a complication of priceless results.

  When he left the room, locking the door behind him, it was still two hours before dawn.

  55

  AFTER TWO DAYS OF CLEAR, WINDBLOWN SKIES, THE warm inland temperatures drew moisture in off the ocean again, and the coast was once more gray with fog in the early-morning darkness. Edmund was forced to follow closely behind Casey’s truck, south through Surf side and into Sunset Beach, keeping the old bullet-shaped tail lights in view. When the truck angled toward the edge of the Highway and slowed down, Edmund turned left and circled the block, parking on 23rd Street where he could see, dimly through the fog, the front end of the parked truck. There was an Arco station open on the corner, and a motorist stood at the pumps. Another drove into the lot now and got out of his car, heading in to pay in advance for his gas.

  This spot was way too busy, Edmund told himself, no place to kill your brother. He laughed a little bit, hunkering down in the seat, eating almonds out of a Baggie and waiting for Casey to come back. His brother’s early-morning routine was Virtually always the same: three or four predawn stops to check out the surf along the several miles of beach break between Seal Beach and Newport, and then straight back to whatever beach looked good to him.

  Casey reappeared from between two rows of apartment houses. He climbed straight back into the truck and fired up the engine, then rolled away again, south toward Huntington, and Edmund let him get far out of sight before swinging away from the curb and following. He reached over and repositioned the video camera on the passenger seat, making
sure again that it hadn’t shut itself off.

  It had first dawned on him down in Mexico that Casey was the problem. Casey had always been the problem. His hatred of his little brother was the first thing he remembered about childhood. He couldn’t pin that hatred on any particular incident, either. It seemed to have no reason except the existence of Casey himself, and yet it was a very real hatred, an authentic hatred, not something that Edmund had made up out of jealousy or some other petty emotion. After all, there was nothing about Casey to be jealous about.

  He spotted the truck’s taillights ahead at an intersection, and he pulled over to wait again. If Casey recognized him, the morning would be wasted. Perhaps if his brother had amounted to something, if he had made any effort at all to carry his own weight, things would have been different. But Casey had never made any such effort. He had adapted perfectly to some kind of moron sixties hippie surfer philosophy, and had spent his life playing while other people worked. He was an uneducated bum, just as much as May-hew had been a bum—a waste of the life force, a drain of cosmic energy like a leaky toilet. Somewhere Edmund had heard that a toilet can leak thousands of gallons of precious water a year, one drop at a time. Multiply that by thousands of leaky toilets, and you could fill a reservoir.

  Last night Casey had called him on the telephone! He had asked Edmund to “back off” on Collier and to give Anne “some space.” Not only had Edmund held onto his temper, he had agreed wholeheartedly. Yes, indeed. He had pretended to be schooled by his little brother, his infantile, no account, do-nothing, beach bum little brother, who obviously was parroting something that he’d heard from Dave the lionheart, the proud bird with the golden hammer. “Lots of leaky toilets,” Edmund muttered. Giving him advice! This morning he was going after one of those leaks with his plumber’s helpers: a gallon of alcohol and a hell of a big spark. Lately he had extended his study of the fine art of fire, and he was anxious to witness the visual effect of the cool blue flame of burning alcohol….