Harry nodded vaguely at his, pulled the photograph from the breast pocket of his gray suit, handed it to the young man and asked, "Is this the woman you're talking about?"
The man looked quickly at the photograph, handed it back, then nodded again. "Yes, that's Babs."
"How did you know my name?" Harry asked.
The man smiled apologetically. "Amelia told us. We saw her on our way here. She tells us everything." He offered his hand. Harry shook it. "Welcome to Silver Lake," the man said, let go of his hand and walked off. Harry watched for a few moments as the man climbed a very narrow alley that lay at right angles to the dead-end street. Like many streets in the community, it sloped severely, so the man had to walk stooped forward to keep his balance.
"You should have joined us," Harry heard someone call from behind him. He turned. A tall, square-jawed, athletic-looking man with short blond hair, dressed only in olive-colored Speedos, strode briskly forward and offered his hand. Harry took it. The man's grip was very firm. and Harry got the idea that he was relishing this little test of strength.
The man said, "If you're looking for Babs, I think you'll find her on the other side. She stays there sometimes." He smiled. His teeth were straight and whitish green under the arc lamps.
Other people gathered around. Some appeared to be on their way home, some were apparently interested in what Harry was doing there.
Harry said, "I was told that she wasn't here anymore."
"Who told you that?" the man asked.
"An old couple," Harry answered, and nodded to indicate the dead-end street. He could see now that there were half a dozen small cottages on it. "They live down there, I think. They said that Babs was staying with the Alexanders, but that the Alexanders don't live here anymore."
"Actually, we do," someone said behind the man in the Speedos. A face appeared near his shoulder. It was pleasant and smiling—the face of a woman in her fifties—and it was fringed by silver hair tinged green by the arc lights. "My name's June," she said. "You must be Mr. Briggs. Amelia told us about you. I would say that if you're looking for Babs, then you should go to the other side. She stays there sometimes. Can't decide which side she's on, I think. Gets sad. Gets blue. Just like you." She grinned. "Goodness, that rhymes," she went on happily. "But that's where you might find her. On the other side."
"Yes," said the man in the Speedos, glancing at her. "I told him all that."
"Thanks," Harry said, and shrugged. "But I'm afraid I have no way over there."
"Mr. Briggs," June Alexander said, "you're more than welcome to use any of the boats. They're community property. I would suggest, however, that if you use one of the power boats, you leave a dollar or two for gas money in the collection can nailed to the pole. You'll see it." She offered her hand. "It was very nice meeting you. Be careful crossing now." She smiled before continuing, "If you do go out on the lake, Mr. Briggs, I'd strongly suggest taking off the trench coat. My guess is that you'll sink like a stone in it." Then she walked off, merging with the crowd.
"Yes," echoed the man in the Speedos. "Please do be careful. The lake's not very large, but these awful lights"—he looked up briefly at them—"are the only source of guidance across it now, and it's frighteningly easy to become disoriented. Sky, land and water seem to merge, and eventually you begin to feel that you're simply ... floating." He gave Harry an odd, lopsided grin. "It's very disconcerting, Mr. Briggs. You can't imagine."
"Harry."
"Hirsute," the man said.
"Hirsute?"
"My little joke. Hirsute, as I'm sure you know, means hairy!"
Harry nodded. "Sure." He forced a small chuckle, though it made him feel like an ass.
The man said, "And my name's Leonard." He shook Harry's hand again, even harder this time. "Good to meet you, Hirsute." He smiled, added, "Don't be such a stranger"—which Harry thought was an odd thing to say—and then merged with the crowd.
"Leonard?" Harry called.
"Yes?"
"Can I use any of the boats?"
"Your choice. Oh, and, Hirsute?"
Harry grimaced and looked in the direction of Leonard's voice. He saw him standing near the monster Buick. He was pointing at the headlights, which Harry had accidentally left on.
"You'll wear your battery down," Leonard called.
"Could you turn them off?" Harry shouted back. "The door's unlocked."
Leonard nodded, then bent over, so he was peering directly into the headlight for a moment, as if the light fascinated him.
This is very odd, Harry thought.
Then Leonard straightened, went to the driver's door, opened it, reached in and turned off the head-lights.
A minute later, the cement slab was empty of people and Harry was trying to decide if he really wanted to go out on Silver Lake in the dark.
"My name is Marlowe."
"It is?"
"This is a game. I'm playing a game."
"Oh. Yes. A game."
"If you can play games, why can't I?"
"Sure. Okay. You're Philip Marlowe."
"Why are your lights out, Phil?"
"No electricity. Didn't pay the bill. But who needs electricity? As long as we have lust, we have light, and heat." He slapped the mattress.
"Do you have a kerosene lamp or some-thing?"
"Who needs lamps in bed?"
"No one, I guess."
"I want us to make love."
"You do?"
"Yes. Very much."
"Very much? That's disappointing."
"Why is it disappointing?"
"You're not a good games player. You just don't have the imagination for it."
"Oh?"
"And no, I don't want to make love. I don't even want to fuck, which would have been preferable."
"Why?"
"Why what? Bespecific. You're so ambiguous."
"Why don't you want to fuck?"
"Some other night, okay? I'm going to take a dip in the pool."
Chapter Eight
Harry didn't swim well. His parents had made him take swimming lessons from the time he could walk until he started high school, so he had learned a number of strokes—Australian crawl, breaststroke, backstroke. But he did none of them well because he was afraid of water that was deeper than his nose. He came close to panic, though he wasn't sure why. His mother told him that when he was an infant, she once had to pull him out of a full bathtub, that he'd swallowed a lot of the soapy water and had to be resuscitated. Perhaps that explained his fears, she suggested.
So he decided not to cross Silver Lake that evening, but go back to his motel. However, as he turned toward the monster Buick, something in the lake caught his eye. He looked. There was a dark object floating just beyond the circle of green light cast by the arc lamps. It was very hard to see—he wasn't sure there was anything. He moved farther out on the cement slab for a better look, but as he moved, the dark object inthe lake moved too. Within seconds, it was gone.
He went back to his motel and lay on the bed in his double-breasted gray suit, trench coat and shoulder holster.
Morning.
He stood naked in front of the bathroom sink and looked in the mirror. His arm was still swollen and purple. This was probably something that should alarm him, he decided, but it didn't. He could feel no pain, and when he touched the swelling it felt hard, which he thought was good. Soft swelling was bad, hard swelling was good—he had probably read that somewhere.
He drove into Silver Lake and found it all but deserted. A man waxing his car in the hot daylight nodded cordially. Harry recognized him as the same man he'd spoken to the previous evening, the one who had come in on hissailboat.
"Fine day," the man called. "Good for all souls." Harry nodded back. He'd put on his black fedora and he doffed it as he drove past.
Another man was apparently on his way to the lake, fishing pole and tackle box in hand, and he too nodded cordially.
Hairy saw no one else, except Amel
ia, who was sitting on the same park bench as the previous evening.
He stopped the monster Buick in the middle of the narrow street and called, "Good morning."
She raised an arm and, without turning her head, gave him a desultory wave.
"You must like that spot," Harry added.
She nodded a little, and in the still, humid air he heard her say, "I do."
He looked at her a minute. It was clear that she didn't want to be disturbed. Why would she? She looked at peace—arms on the top of the park bench, head back. She was enjoying the warmth, the daylight and the quiet lake. What sense would there be in disturbing such contentment?
"Mind if I ask you a few questions?" he called.
She shrugged but said nothing, and her indifference wounded him.
"Am I disturbing you?"
She shook her head.
He parked the car, got out.
She called toward the lake, "Did you find what you were searching for?"
"No," he answered. "I was hoping you could help me."
She patted the bench seat and glanced back at him. "Come sit down. We'll talk."
"Okay," he said, and joined her.
She looked at him. "Harry, take off that silly hat. It went out of style a million years ago."
He nodded. "Sure." He took off the hat and set it on his lap.
"The trench coat too. You're making me sweat."
He nodded again, said, "Sorry," stood, shrugged out of the trench coat and bent over to pick up the fedora, which had fallen to the ground when he stood up.
She smiled at him as he bent over. "Harry, is that thing loaded?"
He looked at her.
She nodded at his snub-nosed .38 in its shoulder holster. He patted the gun, straightened and sat down, trench coat and fedora in his lap. "I don't know. I think so. You want me to check?"
"Does it matter?"
He shifted the trench coat and fedora to one side, pulled the .38 from its shoulder holster and held it up in front of his eyes. "Bullets," he muttered.
"So it is loaded?"
"Sure. Why not? What good is an unloaded gun?"
"I don't like guns, Harry. I never have. Men who carry guns are men with small cocks."
"You think so?"
"I know so."
"Would you like me to keep the gun in my car or something?"
"Lock it in your glove compartment, Harry. That will make me feel better. It will make me feel better about you."
He nodded. "Sure. No problem. I'll do it right now." He stood.
"Sit down, Harry. We'll talk."
He sat down.
Someone had spilled ice cream on the cement in front of the bench and a lone wasp was foraging at the edges of the puddle. Harry thought he could see a dark wasp tongue extended into the white goo.
Amelia said, "For the moment, Harry, until you become acclimatized, I'd suggest that you believe only half of what people tell you in this little community, and none of what you hear."
He smiled at her. "That's playfully cryptic," he said. "Which half of what they tell me am I supposed to believe?"
She looked at the lake again. "Would you like to go for a ride on my party boat?" she said.
The question took him by surprise. "You mean now? This moment?"
"Sure. I'll have you back within the hour. I'll give you the grand tour." She grinned. "It's really a dreamy ride, Harry. Especially when the lake's so smooth."
He shook his head reluctantly. "I can't, Amelia. Thanks anyway, but I really have to. . ."
"Look for Babs." She paused. "I'm afraid, however, that she's gone for the day. She works. I can't say where."
Barbara had a job here? The plot was thickening. "And which half of that am I supposed to believe?" he said.
She looked offended. "You can believe one hundred percent of what I tell you, Harry."
"Thanks," he said. "I'll keep that in mind." He stood. "Maybe you could tell me where the Alexanders live."
She stared blankly at him for a few seconds, as if trying to understand the question, then pointed at a steeply sloping street behind him. "Number fourteen," she said. "Pretty little house. White picket fence, rose trellis, cats, the whole tacky shooting match."
"Thanks," he said. "Can I take a rain check on that boat ride?"
"I'll be right here," she said.
"Good," he said, and looked expectantly at her.
"Something else, Harry?"
"Yes. A restaurant. I haven't eaten…."
"What about the motel restaurant?"
"It's closed."
She shook her head. "No, it isn't. I ate there this morning. It's not closed."
"Mr. Habuda told me when I arrived that it was closed. He said there weren't enough people staying at the motel to keep it open."
Amelia smiled. "There are now. Everyone in the community uses it. Tasty food, and homemade too."
"Thanks," he said.
He went to see if the Alexanders were home.
They weren't. He knocked on the front door a couple of times, then went through the gate of the white picket fence, under the rose trellis—and dodged a big, gaily colored garden spider in the process—to the back door. He knocked there a couple of times and looked in through a window. He saw little. An ancient refrigerator—the kind with the condenser on top, so it looks like a strange sort of alien being—an equally ancient stove and a small white enamel dining table with three bright red chairs. A huge gray Persian cat peered at him from one of these chairs.
He went around to the front again and looked in at another window.
Living room. Old, overstuffed lavender couch and chair—doilies on the arms—an upright piano. And another huge Persian cat asleep on top of the piano. As he watched, it awoke and blinked at him, as if confused. Then its mouth opened in a meow he couldn't hear through the closed window.
He saw a bare foot and calf sticking out on the floor behind the overstuffed chair.
"Good Lord," he whispered, and knocked hard on the window. "You in there. Are you all right?" He put his face to the window and cupped his hands around his eyes to shield them from the light.
The bare foot and calf were gone.
He straightened. "Damn," he whispered.
When he returned to Silver Lake a half hour later, rain had started to fall and people were everywhere. They seemed to love the rain. The day was very warm and still, so the rain itself was warm, and people were splashing about in puddles, walking hand in hand in the rain, holding their faces up to it—the same way, Harry remembered, that Amelia had tilted her face into the fading daylight.
No one had an umbrella. Everyone was dressed in street clothes that were soaked through, but no one seemed to mind. It was one of the oddest sights Harry had ever seen, and he rolled his window down a crack and called to a woman who had her arms outstretched, her head up and her eyes closed, "What's going on? Why's everyone out in the rain?"
"Come and join us, Mr. Briggs," she exclaimed. "The water is so purifying, the water is so good."
"How did you know my name?" he asked.
She kept her face tilted into the rain and her eyes closed, but she turned her head a bit toward him and answered, "Everyone knows you, Mr. Briggs."
Heavenly Eats
Chapter Nine
Sam Goodlow knew he was dead. He was positive of it. He thought that he had never been more positive of anything in his entire life.
Life? (Death? Being alive or being dead? Wasn't that all that the universe had to offer? No gray areas, no tenuous netherworlds, no idyllic and fragile places that grieving people could run to and find an end to their grief.)
Who really knew what life was anyway? The philosophical types said one thing, the scientific types another, and the man on the street said, 'Well, I know that rocks aren't alive anyway." And this seemed reasonable enough, on the face of it, although no one had ever bothered to ask what rocks had to say about it.
Wasn't death nonexistence? Noideas, no
thought, no plans, no future and no present?
Sure. It was obvious.
So, he was just as alive as anyone, although there were some who might be alive in a different way than he was.
It was a quandary.
He realized that he had to pee. It was a strange and wonderful sensation, a pain fraught with possibilities. Who peed but the living, after all?
He cast about for a proper place. So many houses, so many people. He could pee in anyone's house—who would deny him a place to pee? It would be inhuman.
But the need passed asquickly as it had arrived and that made him sad.
Sad too that he found himself plooped down in odd places, at odd times, in front of people he didn't know.
Sometimes with awful results.
Chapter Ten
Harry went, through the rain, to the little cafe that Mr. Habuda owned.
It sat atop a high hill that overlooked Silver Lake, surrounded on three sides by tall maple trees. It looked as if it might once have been a railway dining car, which Harry thought was appealing, but when he tried the door he discovered it was locked.
He peered in through a window. He saw eight round tables covered by red and white checked tablecloths. Four sturdy looking wooden chairs with green upholstered seats stood around these tables. He could see no counter, no cash register and, for that matter, no kitchen. He saw a dark wood door with a rounded top and an oval window, and he guessed that the kitchen was beyond it.
The tables were bare, except for the red and white checked tablecloths. There were no catsup bottles, napkin holders, sugar servers.
Overhead, two bare bulbs hanging from simple brass fixtures lit the place dimly.
He backed away, gave the restaurant a disappointed once-over, decided yet again to forget about his hunger and went down the hill to the Alexanders' house.
They still weren't home, so he waited under the shelter of their front porch roof for the rain to stop. He thought that if they were involved, like everyone else, in the "rain dance" he'd witnessed, then they would come home when the rain let up.
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