Lights Out

by Peter Abrahams

  JFK licked his lips. “I be listening,” he said, almost too softly to hear.

  “Then get this straight. I just got out. I did fifteen years for a crime I knew nothing about. Your crime.”

  “Fifteen years?”

  Eddie took his hands off JFK, rose, walked to the tarpapered window, peered through one of the coin-sized holes. He saw a goat straining its tether to get to the leaves of a dusty bush just out of reach.

  There was a noise behind him. Eddie turned, saw JFK crawling desperately off the mattress. He got hold of the chair, pulled himself up, his movements weak and agitated at the same time; trying to reach eye level with Eddie. He gasped for breath: “But I tries to warn you, man. On the boat radio.”

  “Warn me about what?”

  “Mr. Packer he call ahead to the harbor police in Lauderdale, man. For reporting a stolen boat. No problem, except I know what be on this stolen boat, man. I get on the radio in the bar, to be warning you don’ go to no Lauderdale. But Mr. Packer he come in the bar, see me, shut off the radio.”

  “Did he know what was on board?”

  “No, man. It be just the three of us know.”

  “The three of you?”

  JFK held up three fingers, long and delicate, counted them off one at a time.

  “Me.”

  Eddie nodded.

  “Mandy.”

  Eddie nodded again.

  JFK touched his third finger. “And Jack.”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack your brother.”

  “Jack was in on it?” An image came to him, lit by a beach fire: Jack’s hands and forearms, scratched as if by heavy gardening.

  “Equal partners,” said JFK. “I the owner of the ganja, Mandy she have the buyer in Miami, Jack have the boat. I be aksing you first, but you was saying no to me.” JFK’s body, supported by his grip on the card-table chair, began to tremble. The feet of the chair rattled on the floor.

  Jack had been in on it. That explained why the search for JFK had been a sham-a real investigation would have implicated him too-but it didn’t explain everything. “Did Jack know Packer called the harbor cops?”

  “Sure he know. We all right there in the bar-me, Packer, Jack.”

  “And Jack didn’t try to stop him?”

  “He try. He say why be making it police matters? Packer he say to teach you respect for property. Not just the boat-the girl too, that be his system of thinking. They argue back and forth.”

  “But Jack didn’t tell him about the dope?”

  “How he do that without he incriminating hisself? Instead he tell Mr. Packer come out on the beach, for talking private. That give me the chance to call you. But Mr. Packer he smart. He come running back in, rip the plug out of the wall.”

  “That was all?” Eddie said.

  “All?”

  “All it took to stop my brother?”

  JFK thought for a moment. “Like he could hit Mr. Packer on the head or thing like that?”

  “If he had to.”

  JFK shook his head. “No way,” he said. “Mr. Packer he use his hold on your brother.”

  “What hold?”

  “He say one more trick and you don’ be gettin’ the seven and a half percent.”

  “That stopped him?”

  “Seven and a half percent of everyt’ing, man. The hotel, the time share, the golf, the marina. Could have been millions, maybe. Millions. You understand the forces of the situation?”

  Eddie understood. Understanding had a physical component; at first it was all physical: a light-headedness, as though he were much too tall, and fragile, like some strange bird. Then came the mental part, the fact of what Jack had done to him and the way it had happened. But not how Jack could have done it to him. He wanted one thing: to ask Jack that question.

  Eddie stood motionless in JFK’s hot room, unconscious of passing time. His mind was far away, in a cold northern place of pirate games, of hockey, of falling through the ice. He thought of all that, and more, but failed to find the reason why. Just the MacGuffin, the bookstore boy had said, a device. There was no explanation. Would he have to accept that, in the poem and in his own life? Silence thickened, tangible, immobilizing. JFK broke it by saying, “Hey! You all right?”

  Eddie grew aware of JFK leaning on the card-table chair across the room, separated from him by golden bars of light. The light burnished all his bony parts, as though they were already exposed.

  “You better lie down,” Eddie said.

  JFK nodded, made his way to the mattress, sat, used his hands to pull up his legs, lay down. Eddie could hear him breathing, fast and shallow. After a few minutes he groaned, then breathed more slowly. He looked at Eddie.

  “Too weak, man. But I be wanting you to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That it wasn’t me.”

  Eddie nodded. “More water?”

  “Not a drop to drink.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too far to go, all the way down from ninety-seven percent. Nine or ten, maybe. I could reach it from there. But not ninety-seven.”

  Eddie opened the backpack, took out a wad of bills, put them in JFK’s hand.

  “What this?” said JFK.

  “For medicine, the doctor, whatever you need.”

  “Your brother’s money?”

  “Mine.”

  “You got money? That be something, anyway.” JFK’s eyes went to the Marley poster: “One World.”

  “I be wanting to make a little confession,” he said.

  Eddie waited.

  “JFK no be a gay man.”

  “You said that.”

  “But he be doing some gay things at one time, despite his own self.”

  “So what?” Eddie said.

  There were no buses in Cotton Town, no jitneys, no taxis. Eddie borrowed JFK’s rusty bicycle, promising to send it back from Galleon Beach. In fifteen years he had made no plans other than to quit smoking, to take nothing with him, to have a steam bath. He had realized all of them, not hard to do. The hard part was knowing what you wanted. And now Eddie knew. He wanted a house on a bluff and a bay for swimming. There were other islands. He bicycled north, toward the airstrip and a flight to the next one in the chain.

  It was hot, the road bumpy, the pack increasingly heavy on his back. Eddie was aware of all those things, but they didn’t bother him. He was alive, he was free, he had money, all he would ever need. He tried dividing fifteen into $488,220. Thirty-two thousand and something per annum, as though he had spent those years teaching high school: not an excessive return.

  Eddie pedaled JFK’s bike. The track widened slightly, grew smoother. Soon he would see the white house on the bluff, the hippie house with the peace sign on the roof. Five or ten minutes had passed without a single thought of Jack. That was good. That was the way it would have to be. He came to the bluff, saw a lane leading up to the house, paused.

  A dust cloud rose in the distance, over the treetops. It drew closer, like a small approaching storm. A car appeared beneath the dust cloud, sunlight glinting off the windshield. It topped a rise a few hundred yards from Eddie, going fast, much too fast for the road. He pulled to the side, got off the bike.

  The car roared by, so quickly and spewing so much dust that Eddie didn’t see the driver at all. He pushed JFK’s bike back on the road, adjusted the backpack, got ready to remount. Then the car made a shrieking sound. Eddie looked in time to see it skidding sideways, wheels locked, on the edge of control. But not out of it: the car spun around and came toward him, slower now. The dust began to settle, leaving a little smudged dome across the sky.

  The car stopped beside him. The door opened. Karen got out.

  32

  “The world is much smaller than you think,” Karen said.

  They stood on the Cotton Town road, Karen beside her car, Eddie at the head of the lane leading to the hippie house.

  “I’m familiar with the concept,” Eddie replied.

  Ka
ren laughed, a complex sound and not particularly friendly. “Maybe it’s Jack who’s not.”

  He saw himself reflected in her sunglasses, two uncertain little Eddies, leaning on their bikes.

  “I’m going to disappoint you this time,” Eddie said.

  “In what way?”

  “If you’ve come to pump me about my brother.”

  Karen took off her sunglasses. There were shadows under her eyes and her face was pale. “We’re just like an old couple,” she said, “picking up the conversation in mid-fight.”

  A breeze stirred in the trees, clearing away the dust, blueing the sky. Karen looked up at the hippie house. “Why don’t we just go up and talk to him?”

  “He’s not there.”

  Her eyes went to Eddie, and then to the backpack. “Aren’t you the loyal little brother.”

  There was no reason to be loyal, now that he knew what Jack had done. Still, Eddie replied: “You’re a cop.”

  “Not exactly,” Karen said. “And he’s no longer the subject of an investigation.”

  “Why is that?” Was it simply the returning of the $230,000, or did she know Jack was dead? Had his body been found and identified? Eddie couldn’t think of any reason why Senor Paz would let that happen.

  “Lack of evidence,” Karen replied.

  “And you’ve come to dig up more.”

  “I told you-the investigation is over.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  Karen didn’t answer right away. Her eyes weren’t quite the same now. Same shade of blue, of course, but because of her fatigue, or the heat, or something else, not as cool as before.

  “You,” she said.

  “You’re investigating me?”

  “In a sense.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “In the broadest sense. I’m interested in you. In what happened to you.”

  “For your thesis?”

  “If you like.” Karen put her sunglasses back on. “I’ve read the transcript of your trial. You denied knowing the marijuana was on board. I found myself inclined to believe you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  There was a long pause. Then Karen said: “They executed Willie Boggs last night.” She waited for Eddie to speak. He watched his close-mouthed reflection in her sunglasses and said nothing. “Some odd things happened,” Karen went on. “First I spoke to a man named Messer. He seemed very curious to know your whereabouts. Not long after that, not long after Willie died, in fact, Messer died too. Bullet in the head. I found him in the ambulance that should have been carrying Willie. Willie’s body bag was empty. They counted the inmates. One was missing. Can you guess who?”

  “No.” But he could.

  “Angel Cruz. The one they call El Rojo. Did you know him?”

  “We’d met.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Are you suggesting I helped him escape?”

  “No. I’m just wondering if you can explain what happened.”

  “Why would I be able to do that?” Eddie said, and Karen didn’t answer. But he could explain it, all right. He understood everything: how El Rojo must have gotten to Messer, how, fearing surveillance, he had tried to set up the payoff rendezvous using the hundred-dollar bill, how Eddie had interfered with the plan, first by not giving the bill to Sookray in the Dunkin’ Donuts lot, later by handing her the wrong one. El Rojo had found another method, proving his resourcefulness and Messer’s naivete. He’d be in Colombia by now, lying low on one of his ranches.

  “Come up with it yet?” said Karen.

  Eddie saw that her face had paled more, wondered if she was running a fever. “What does your friend with the gun think?”

  “Forget him. Max errs on the side of error.” The angle of her sunglasses dipped, as though she was looking him over. “Your appearance made him cautious.”

  Caution; not a bad idea. Eddie moved closer to the car, checked inside, saw no one lying on the backseat or crouched on the floor.

  “Want me to open the trunk?” Karen said.

  Eddie shook his head.

  Tiny beads of sweat appeared on her upper lip. She brushed them off with the back of her hand. “You won’t mind if I see for myself,” she said.

  “See what?”

  “If Jack’s up there.” She got in the car, waited for Eddie to join her. When he did not, she turned the key and drove up the lane. Eddie stood for a minute or two by the side of the road. Then he mounted JFK’s bike and followed.

  The lane rose steeply up the bluff, so steeply that Eddie had to get off and walk the bike most of the way. He rounded a bend, passed another tree bearing the small yellow-green fruit, and came to her car, parked beside the house. From there, at the top of the bluff, he could see to the horizon where an invisible line segregated sky-blue from sea-blue. Closer in, perhaps a mile offshore, waves broke over the reef. Not far beyond them the long white cruiser he had seen at Galleon Beach glided south.

  There was no sign of Karen. Eddie walked to the screen door at the side of the house. Near the handle the screen was bent back from the frame, leaving a fist-sized hole. Eddie opened the door and went in.

  Kitchen. Discolored rectangles imprinted on the linoleum marked the spots where the appliances had rested. Nothing remained but a wine bottle with a candle in it, upright on the floor, and a simple wooden table, painted yellow. An enormous toad squatted on it like a centerpiece in a restaurant destined to fail. For a moment Eddie wasn’t sure whether it was alive. Then its long tongue flicked out and caught an ant crawling across the table.

  Eddie went through the kitchen to the living room, the toad’s eyes following him the whole way. The living room had a fraying sisal carpet on the floor but no furniture. A screened porch with a rusted kettle barbecue and another endless view ran the length of the room. The long white cruiser had moved farther south. As Eddie watched, it turned out to sea, away from the reef, circled, and started coming back.

  At the far end of the room was a narrow staircase. Eddie went up. There were words on the wall, painted in faded rainbow colors:

  Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?

  The stairs led to the single room on the top floor. A bedroom, with bed still in place. Too hard to move: an ancient and massive four-poster, probably shipped from Europe generations ago, carved with roses and hung with mosquito netting. What the bed might have implied the walls and ceiling clearly stated. Every inch of whitewashed space was covered with rainbow-painted inscriptions:

  Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

  And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

  I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then? But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly? Or snorted in the seven sleepers’ den?

  They do not love that do not show their love.

  Is it, in Heav’n, a crime to love too well? To bear too tender or too firm a heart, To act a lover’s or a Roman’s part? Is there no bright reversion in the sky For those who greatly think, or bravely die?

  Western wind, when wilt thou blow? The small rain down can rain, — Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!

  Cross that rules the Southern Sky! Stars that sweep, and turn, and fly, Hear the Lovers’ Litany:-“Love like ours can never die!”

  That out of sight is out of mind Is true of most we leave behind; It is not sure, nor can be true, My own and only love, of you.

  And dozens, perhaps hundreds more, crowding out any blank space. Karen stood with her back to him, head tilted to read the one about out of sight and out of mind, written on the ceiling.

  “Arthur Hugh Clough,” she said without turning: “the Leo Buscaglia of Romantic poetry.”

  “Never heard of him,” Eddie said. “Either of them.”
r />   “You’re not missing anything.” She faced him. “Coleridge is your man, isn’t he? Or have you chucked him?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  She reached into her bag, removed a charred red scrap. He recognized it: the remains of the Monarch he had thrown in the fire at the Palazzo. He didn’t reply.

  Karen glanced around the walls. “Nothing here from your Mariner. I guess he doesn’t fit the theme of the room.”

  “ ‘A spring of love gushed from my heart,’ ” Eddie said, the words coming of their own accord. “ ‘And I blessed them unaware.’ ”

  Karen smiled. “You’re something, you know that? But whoever wrote all this didn’t have that kind of love in mind.” She looked out the window. The sun was low in the sky now, flabby and red. The long white cruiser lay at anchor, outside the reef.

  She gazed at it for a few moments, then said: “No Jack.”

  “That’s right.”

  Behind Karen, the sun kept sinking, reddening, fattening. She ran her finger through the dust on the sill. “What is this place?” she said, turning to him.

  “They call it the hippie house.”

  “Hippies with a Ph.D. in literature.”

  “Or dropouts with a Bartlett’s.”

  Karen laughed. “Does it matter?” She looked around. “They were besotted, that’s what counts.” He stared at her.

  “That surprises you, doesn’t it, coming from me?” she said. She waved her hand at the room. “Can’t you just picture it? The candles, the dope, the long-haired boy and girl, the moon shining through on all this poetry?” She swallowed.

  He could picture it. The image brought to mind another: the tennis shed, damp and dark, with the warped racquets on the wall and the mound of red clay. Perhaps the hippies had been on the island at the same time, just miles down the Cotton Town road.

  Karen moved away from the window, took a step toward him. “I was wrong, Eddie.”

  “About what?”

  “The world. It’s not small. It’s a big, big place, and right now we’re far away.”

  “From where?”