by Hob Broun
Tildy felt cool glass against her hand. “Not yet. Not just yet.”
“Demon heat.”
DaVita’s squelching hands moved in wider and wider circles as she opened her legs and Tildy became aware of layered fragrances, the slightly rancid oil, something sharp and gaseous released from DaVita’s body. She pressed her eyes harder into the crook of her arm and there were blinking yellow dots in the blackness behind them. This is ridiculous, Tildy told herself. You want to look, she wants you to look. So go ahead and look.
DaVita had three fingers of one hand jammed up into herself, the other hand softly pivoting at the top of her hairless seam. Tildy was not aroused by what she saw, not physically; but DaVita bit down on her lip, Tildy looked into a face that was a fixed animal mask of something resembling pain, and was moved. Moved by a raw tenderness. This frantic, despairing woman inches away with every nerve exposed. It was touching and sweetly sad and almost like looking at herself.
“Oooh, I’m coming, coming.”
And quickly Tildy pushed DaVita’s hand aside and replaced it with her own. Her fingers were numb, a set of tools; she felt everything with her eyes.
Heaving, DaVita flipped onto her side and hugged her knees. “Thank you,” she whispered.
The wrong thing to say. Those two words of gratitude, and the deadly confusion behind them, pushed outside the magic circle, destroyed illusion like a long knife slicing through the center of a movie screen.
Tildy whispered back, “I’m going to swim,” and zipped off with sand spraying out behind her.
Motionless, Gina and her brother watched the sea. Tildy’s hand on her tiny shoulder, soft as putty, didn’t startle; Gina remained straight and still, not looking up at the woman whose name she did not know.
“Is it time for lunch?”
“Later for that. Would you like to go in the water with me? I’ll hold you tight so you won’t go under.”
“We’re not allowed,” Robbie said. “You go in. We’ll be your lifeguards.”
Tildy waded out, arms floating on the easy swell, and rinsed her mouth with stinging salt water. She bowed herself backward, dunking her face and bringing it back out to the sun, then swam out beyond the breakers with short, hitched strokes, her eyes burning, the water a slow-motion tongue on her body. She dove under the choppy surface and frog-kicked along until her lungs were ready to split, broke the surface sputtering, gasping for breath, and looked back.
The figures on the beach were small and stick-like, discernible only because of the white background. They could just as easily be clumps of driftwood. A wavelet smacked her in the back of the head. She turned and swam on, stirring up bubbles with her chopping arms. Cold began to penetrate her tightened skin. Tildy’s head swiveled out of the water to inhale on every other stroke now, and it was as if she’d entered a different atmosphere where the oxygen was thinner. She was clenching her teeth, squeezing shut her eyes as she battled the thick water, and her whole faced ached with the tension. She tried to relax and slow her pace, to glide easily and relieve the stiffness in her legs. Smaller movements, no wasted effort. But her arms felt limp and heavy and her entire body throbbed with the cold. It was time to turn back.
Heading for shore with renewed energy, Tildy pulled up after a few minutes to check her progress and found she wasn’t any closer. Only the power station loomed larger, interlocking cubes of white concrete. Could she, in the confusion of fatigue, have been swimming parallel to the beach? Or drifting on some lateral current with a pull stronger than her own? No wonder they called it the crawl; Treading water, she sighted her course and plunged forward, counting to a hundred before she raised her head again. From the look of it, she wasn’t getting anywhere. Fear traveled like an electric current down the length of her shivering body and there was a smell of iodine on the wind.
She waved her arms and yelled, hoping DaVita would hear her. But panic was fatal; that was how people drowned, clawing wildly and hopelessly at the water, flailing away in one spot until they exhausted themselves and disappeared. She reminded herself of the natural buoyancy of salt water. If she surrendered to it totally, would it cup her like a hand and carry her to safety? She flipped onto her back, buying time, staying afloat by virtue of scissoring legs while her arms rested, trailing along at her sides. The sound of the water rushing by was like a lullaby and the sun was warm on her breasts that jutted into the air like two volcanic islands. The pain in her shoulders lightened and a dreamy torpor spread over her. It felt so good to rest, to snooze in the bobbing rhythm of the waves. A rolling liquid cradle.
Then came the moment when Tildy gave in to it, stopped moving altogether and dropped below. She fought her way back up coughing and gagging, and stared in dismay at the silent, smooth expanse of beach that was still so far away. Steady, steady. But she could sense her body hardening with cold and fear. Darkness awaited her if she lost another second.
She swam ten strokes and rested; another ten strokes, another rest. Easy now, go easy. Push down through the water, don’t slap at it. Ten strokes and rest. Ten strokes and rest. Treading water was now as hard as swimming through it, but the pain abated just enough each time, only to begin again on the very first stroke. She did not look up, certain that knowledge of the distance yet to cover would defeat her. Every tendon and muscle, every flap of tissue, was in flames. She swallowed water, groaned aloud with each rotation of her arms. Now she could manage only five strokes before a rest, five pitiful, paddling strokes with limbs that would soon be useless. Her ears pounded, her nose ran and her heart thundered like an overloaded motor about to shake itself apart.
Her foot scraped across a rock and she went limp, submerged, gripped the bottom with her toes, lurched and stumbled forward till she fell, retching, trembling, and ground the bits of rock and broken shell against her skin. Land.
Tildy lay there for a very long time with the surf washing peacefully over her, no longer the enemy. Her knees gave way each time she tried to stand and so it was on all fours that she scrabbled up the beach, calling for DaVita but drawing no answer.
Painfully and slowly she dressed. The foot that had scraped the rock was bleeding, the nail of its second toe torn partway off. She wrapped it in a napkin from her pocket before easing into shoes and hobbling over the dunes.
No particular surprise in finding the car gone. Nothing to do but get on the road and start walking. With any luck she’d catch a couple of rides and be in Gibsonton before dark. That made her think of Christo. Of Silvio. Now DaVita. And emphatically she told herself: I’ve got to stop picking up strangers.
If only there were some shade to sit in. She hadn’t been walking long, only two cars had passed her by, but with each step the top of her sneaker rasped against the mauled foot. Crouched down, fumbling with the laces, she heard squealing tires behind her, turned to see gleaming chrome grillework and a bulge of blue hood.
“Oh my God, you’re alive.” DaVita’s voice. “You’re alive.” She tumbled out of the car, ran around and crushed Tildy in her arms. “You’re alive and I thought you were dead.”
“So you figured to leave me for the crabs to pick over and took off in my car.”
“Try and understand.”
“Understand! Fuck you.”
DaVita reached in, brought out the car keys, and as Tildy went to snap them up, caught her behind the neck and drove her rubbery mouth against the thin red line of Tildy’s lips. One manic, grappling kiss and she retreated, pulling hair in front of her face.
“There’s no way to explain it. I just freaked out, that’s all. You were out there so long and we lost sight of you. Up and down the beach, up and down, staring out till my eyes blurred. I didn’t know whether to stay or whether to go somewhere and call the police or the Coast Guard. I didn’t know what to do, so I just freaked.”
“Get in the car.”
Tildy slammed the door, rammed in the key and the engine knocked and roared. She felt a tug on her hair; it was Robbie, his gray eyes w
ide and clear. Next to him on the back seat, Gina was wrapped in a towel and fast asleep with thumb in mouth.
“Mommy said you couldn’t hear us underwater.”
Just then a thought dropped into Tildy’s mind, plop, like a honeydew melon tossed out of a third story window. “You don’t know how to swim, do you?”
“Not a lick.” DaVita nodded. “I know a lot of other things, like how to change a set of sparkplugs or how to make jambalaya or how to keep a man from shooting off too quick or how to stay up all night without watching teevee or listening to the radio, but I don’t know a damn thing to do around water.”
“You should have mentioned that before, DaVita. You really should have mentioned that before.”
The return trip passed in stunning silence.
Pulling up at the entrance to DaVita’s trailer park, Tildy left the motor running.
“Why don’t you come on in and I’ll make us something to eat. You like pig feet?”
“Just go.”
DaVita leaned against the open door looking scrawny and beat and pawed at her scarred face; a ruined child who’d been missing the point all her life, soon to trap herself inside a brand-new shape, the imperviously smashed oval of inertia without end.
“Will I see you again?”
Tildy smiled in spite of herself, pulled the door shut and drove.
Karl was in the backyard bouncing a tennis ball off the wall of the house.
“What happened to your foot?”
“Banged it up on a rock,” Tildy said.
He showed her the gauze on the back of his hand. “Sliced it open on a saw up at Keyeses’. Guess it’s been that kind of day all around. But I got the side pieces up, ought to be finished by Monday.”
He underhanded the fuzzless gray ball to her but she didn’t reach; it skittered into the weeds.
“You ain’t up for a catch, huh?”
“I’m exhausted, Karl, and sick to my stomach.”
“Too much sun probably.”
“Much too much.”
“Come on, darlin’, I’ll squeeze a dozen oranges for you.”
Tildy lay in bed with a cool cloth over her eyes and soft pillows under her head. In her stomach all that salt water she’d swallowed could not escape the influence of the tides. Up and back it rolled, up and back, up and back.
“Here. You don’t have to sit up.” Karl guided a straw between her lips. “I left a little of the pulp in. Just the way you like it.”
“Fine. Put it there and I’ll have it later.”
“You goin’ right off to sleep?”
“Sleeping or just lying still. I don’t know.”
Karl touched her naked instep with a cautious finger and she jumped. “Hush now, little sweetness. I’m only thinkin’ you ought to have a bath, give this foot a little soakin’. It’ll soften up the nail so she comes off nice and easy.”
“I don’t want to get up.”
“Don’t you worry.”
Karl filled the tub, undressed her, carried her in and lowered her into the water. Hot, safe water that welcomed her. He bent down very gradually and brushed her lips with his. A dry, fleeting, sober kiss, but the sweetest she’d ever had. She purred softly while he soaped her.
“Lord, it’s so good to be home,” she said.
And meant it.
12
LANDING IN TANGIER AT six in the morning, stiff-necked and bleary with trepidation, Christo was hard-pressed to accept the reality of African soil beneath him and the game now beginning in earnest.
Twelve hours ago, in a Midtown delicatessen lined with celebrity photographs, Pierce had given him a single piece of parting advice: “Be alert.” No problem. Nestled at the bottom of his cigarette pack were two little methamphetamine footballs; a green rabbit’s foot sat in his pocket. He’d be alert all right, at critical mass. He chainsmoked by the baggage carousel and his eyes moved like automatic cameras in a bank, checking every face.
The customs inspection was perfunctory—a heft of his bag, a fast dig around the sides, a squiggle of chalk on top. His phony passport was glanced over, duly stamped by a civil servant with a prosthetic hand. A real work of art, the passport, handcrafted by a woman who had married briefly into the Milbank family, who ran a design studio turning out corporate logos at ten thousand dollars a pop. The new identity was Arno Bester, Professor of Biochemistry, and in a tweed one-button with elbow patches, baggy slacks and bow tie, Christo was trying to look the part.
In the small café by the observation deck he ordered a pot of coffee and turned to the smuggler’s basic activity: waiting. The coffee was strong and thick and made his stomach pucker along with his mouth. Or was that anxiety twisting in him like a parasitic worm?
He took out the Polaroid of his local contact. In front of a wattle-and-daub hut, a brawny, heavy-boned individual with blond whiskers posed, wearing a cable-knit sweater and a bicycle racer’s cap with the bill turned up. He stood at attention, an expressionless mug-book figurine under a sky whose marine hue probably had more to do with developer chemicals than any quality of North African light. Tomas Ulrich was the name. He was a Swedish expatriate who’d had a long and (to insiders) renowned career as an arms dealer: AK-47s to the Turkish Cypriots, grenade launchers to the Pretoria-backed faction in Angola, plastique to the IRA, and on and on. But he was retired now, ran an auto body shop in the heart of the city.
“Tommy’s an absolute no-bullshit pro. A heavyweight,” Pierce had promised. “If there’s any trouble it won’t come from him.”
But Christo didn’t much care for the idea that his envoy and broker, the hinge on which the deal would swing, was a weapons man. Gunrunning, it was agreed even among the hardened, was an unusually demented business. It attracted men interested in more than money, taught them that anyone, even a partner, was ripe for the picking.
Already Christo needed help. He did not want to leave the consoling anonymity of the airport. They’d taught him about synthetic spirit on the inside, where time was measured by the clattering of pills in the bottom of tiny paper cups. He shook out one of the footballs and medicated himself. There now. The moment after swallowing, he felt more hopeful about the task ahead; like starting down the road with a full tank of gas.
He taxied to the American Express office where he converted traveler’s checks into Moroccan francs. In the men’s room of a nearby hotel, he packed everything into a money belt, a thick and cumbersome going-away gift from Pierce that reminded him of the protective crotch gear boxers wore. Bomblets of speed lunacy went off in his head as he prowled the lobby full of international citizens with their guidebooks and cameras, their contented-cow stolidity he now envied. His mouth felt full of sand. It was all coming up too fast, too suddenly. The scam was too big for him. In hurried misjudgement, he was going to give himself the hustler’s bends.
Okay, okay. Just a little stage fright. Deal with it. He sat on the edge of a Naugahyde chair and lectured himself. Now was the time to flush out his system; there’d be no place for this kind of thing later on. Any sign of it and they’d shred him like a classified document. Keep moving, just keep moving. Let yourself go. Half the pressure, twice the quickness. And finally, because there was no other way out, he pulled himself as tight as the money belt and went on to his next appointment.
The purchase of the Land Rover had been prearranged with transatlantic phone calls and a money order. The salesman wanted very much to take him out for a test run, but Christo dissuaded him. He said he had to be immediately on his way to a meeting with government agronomists in Tetuán, and the lie had a tonic effect. Falling back into the old skills centered him. That’s it, just keep moving. He pulled out his Arno Bester driver’s license, signed half a dozen forms, and the salesman handed over the keys along with a complimentary map of the city.
The noon heat was insidious despite the ocean breeze, and Christo shrugged out of his jacket, removed the clip-on tie. Following the written instructions, he went down to the abrupt end o
f a palm-lined avenue and jogged right. Slow-moving chaos closed in, jumbled buildings and people layered like compost along the brown walls. He gripped the wheel hard. Nasty birdcage voices poured with sticky air through the Rover’s windows. The breeze was cut off here, the salt fragrance replaced by something heavy and unplaceable, though spoiled melon came close. Someone on a motorbike made a sudden U turn in front of him, and Christo trod on the brake, banged his knee on the edge of the metal dash. He considered the grisly upshot of a pedestrian under his wheels: pulled from the driver’s seat and devoured by a raging native mob.
The fright was on him again. He watched bunched faces passing, brown complexions like camouflage, eyes angling toward him. Enough turbulence out there beneath the steady, sullen surface to drown in. He’d been against a foreign venue all along, but Pierce had insisted. Fine for him, Pierce was the strategic whiz who never left headquarters. Christo was smack-dab and defenseless in this human overflow, his only weapon—language—useless here. Hold on and move through it. Keep moving.
Then in a blink, the way was empty, like an eerie curfew zone. These walls were whitewashed and topped with broken glass; doors were armored with black wrought iron. It seemed that the air had thinned, the heat lessened, but Christo did not know whether to trust even his own senses. He was so intent on monitoring himself that he nearly missed his turn.
The street had narrowed, gone rough under him, by the time he located the shop. Tomas stood in the doorway sucking on a pipe and looking like a retired fisherman surveying the sea.
Christo parked in the entryway and hopped down. “Hey, partner, J. D. Christo from the New York office.”
Teeth clenched around the pipestem in what might have been a smile, Tomas sidled over and patted Christo’s back, sides, hips—an overt frisk. “Just a reflex,” he said apologetically. His English was without accent. “New York is full of statues.”
“But there are never enough heroes to go around,” Christo replied, fulfilling the witless password requirement.