Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  Outside she told me she couldn’t quite believe she’d said that. “Forget it,” I said. “Right now he’s telling them it’s the best offer he’s had all night, and everybody’s laughing nervously. Let’s get some coffee.”

  Over coffee she talked about Milwaukee. She mentioned her daughter, of whom I had not previously heard, and said she was staying with her mother, whom she hadn’t mentioned either. She also talked about her boss; the implication seemed to be that he was married, and that she was sleeping with him, and doing so largely because he was there. She never quite said this, but I wouldn’t have inferred it if she hadn’t wanted me to.

  Then we went up to her room, and told each other that the floorshow probably hadn’t been as bad as it seemed to us, and then we went to bed, and neither of us could get in the mood. I made us a couple of drinks and we talked.

  I came fairly close to opening up. I talked a little about the years in Special Forces, and a little more about how I had spent my time since my discharge, and some more about the things I might do next. Or might not do. I didn’t say as much as I might have, but I think she understood more than I put words to. After a while we got off that peg and started talking about things instead, and talked for hours, and then made love after all.

  We never did get to sleep. Her plane left at ten and she wouldn’t let me take her to it. I didn’t argue with her. It was getting very difficult to avoid talking about us and what future we might have. Neither of us had broached the subject but sooner or later one of us might, and that seemed like a bad idea. I watched her pack. At eight she went downstairs to check out and I went to my room.

  From ten, when her plane was supposed to take off, until three, by which time it would have long since arrived, I kept my radio on. I was absolutely certain her plane would crash, and I couldn’t decide whether this meant that I was terrified of losing her or that I wanted the plane to crash. Then I decided that they were both the same thing, and then I thought that if I had kept my appointment with the psychiatrist it would have been one of the questions I could have asked him. But of course the appointment would have taken place before her flight, and—

  I stayed awake all day Sunday, and all that night, and most of Monday as well. I spent most of the time walking around. I ordered a few meals but couldn’t get much down. Early Monday afternoon I wrote her a long letter telling her that I loved her and wanted to marry her and adopt her daughter and get a job with a future. I used an entire stack of hotel stationery. Then I panicked because I didn’t have her address, and then I remembered that I could get it from the hotel registration card. I decided to do that right away, but first I stretched out on the bed for a moment to think how grand our life would be together, and everything caught up with me and I slept for twenty hours.

  I woke up covered with sweat, certain I had mailed the letter. I looked for it on the desk and couldn’t find it, and was positive someone on the hotel staff had found it and mailed it for me. I got the housekeeper on the phone and, I’m sure, convinced her only that I was out of my mind. The letter was on the bed. I saw it there and hung up the phone and got a pack of matches and burned every scrap of the letter. I didn’t even let myself read it, just burned each sheet and flushed the ashes down the toilet.

  I started scanning the yellow pages for psychiatrists, then gave up and threw the book halfway across the room. If I made an appointment I would break it or forget it. Or lose the address, or miss my train, or something.

  Because the obvious truth was that I could not be trusted. I did not know my own mind, and could not, because my mind was in too many places at once. I have seen men freeze in combat, attacked on the right and the left at once and unable to return fire in either direction, standing stupidly in their tracks until bullets knocked them down. I now knew how they felt. I was dangerous, to myself and to anyone near me. I had to be all alone somewhere until things settled down.

  Do nothing, I thought.

  Two perfect words, answering everything. See Sharon or don’t see Sharon? Do nothing. Get a job or don’t get a job? Do nothing. Join a mercenary army? Do nothing.

  I cashed in all my government bonds, drew all my money out of the several banks who were taking care of it. I bought a money belt at Abercrombie ft Fitch and put 193 hundred dollar bills in it, along with my discharge and my birth certificate and my diploma. Then I wore it underneath my clothes and resolved never to take it off, not even in the shower. Wherever I went, I wanted to have everything with me.

  Then I packed everything that seemed important into one suitcase and told the bellhop to do what he wanted with the rest. I paid my hotel bill and took a taxi all the way to Idlewild. It would have been cheaper to take the coach from the terminal, but I was sure something would go wrong if I didn’t get to the airport as quickly as possible. I got there. All I had decided until then was that I wanted to go someplace warm; it was October, and I didn’t want to have to buy winter clothes. By the time I was at the airport I had settled on Miami, probably because I had been there once, years ago. I was able to get a flight leaving in four hours. I bought a newspaper and spent four hours reading it. I read everything, want ads, stock-market quotations, everything I could find. I was first in line for my flight, first on the plane, first off when we landed.

  On the plane I made a list of rules:

  DO NOTHING

  1. Never write a letter to anyone.

  2. Make no phone calls.

  3. Don’t talk to anyone.

  4. No women exc. whores if you have to.

  5. Two drinks every day before dinner, otherwise none.

  6. Three meals every day.

  7. Exercise regularly, swimming and calisthenics, keep in shape.

  8. Plenty sleep, sunshine.

  9. Don’t go anywhere exc. movies.

  10. When in doubt, do nothing.

  THREE

  THE SUN WOKE me. It slanted through my door every morning, a few seconds earlier than the previous day, a few seconds later than the following day. Midwinter had come and gone, and now the sun was rising just a little bit earlier every morning, and so was I. There were no clouds in the sky, hardly a ripple on the surface of the ocean. They could have used my view for an airlines ad. I walked straight from the cabin to the ocean and swam around in it for fifteen or twenty minutes, then came back and built a fire on the beach while I let the sun dry me. I broke the last two eggs into the frying pan and noted that it was my day to row across to Mushroom Key. I ate two eggs every morning and went to Mushroom Key every sixth day to buy a dozen more eggs and whatever else I needed. The store was the closed-in porch of Clinton Mackey’s house, and was thus open seven days a week, which saved me the trouble of owning a calendar. I could usually figure out about what day of the week it was and could make a fair stab at the date. This day, for example, was probably a Thursday, because I seemed to remember that it had been Friday when I last rowed over to Mackey’s. (Or was that the time before?) And it was somewhere around the middle of January, maybe just past the middle, because the first of the year, as I recalled, had come on a Monday. So if I had had to guess, I would have made it Thursday, January 19. But I didn’t have to guess because it didn’t matter.

  I ate my eggs and sausages, made a cup of instant coffee, drank it, washed my dishes in the ocean, dried them, put them away. I added the empty egg carton to the fire and let it burn itself out. There was a list tacked to the inside of my cabin door, and I read it through, as I did every morning. It was the same list I had made on the plane, the Do Nothing list; I had had to copy it over several times, but I hadn’t changed a word, as though the precise phrasing of the original was catechismic in importance.

  I read a chapter in my current book while my breakfast got itself digested. It was a paperback, The Lives of the Great Composers. This morning I read about Robert Schumann. When he was 34 he developed a profound distaste for high places, for all metal instruments (including keys), and for drugs. He also constantly imagined that he heard t
he note “A” sounding in his ears. This went on for two years. I learned other things about him, none of which I remembered for very long.

  I put The Lives of the Great Composers back on top of the portable fridge. It was just as calm and clear outside as before, and warmer. I ran three laps around the island, which was about the size of a football field with the corners rounded. I usually ran six laps, which I figured added up to about a mile, and I usually did pushups and sit-ups and such, but on rowing days I limited myself to three laps. My island was a good half mile from Mushroom Key, and that much rowing makes up for no end of sit-ups and pushups and arm-waving.

  I sprinted the last hundred yards or so and wasn’t even breathing hard when I finished. I cooled off in the ocean dried off in the sun, and did all the things I had to do before my trip to the store. My money belt was buried ten yards behind the cabin. I dug it up, brushed the sand off, fastened it around me. I put on underwear and a shirt and dungarees and socks and shoes. I dressed for trips to the store and when the weather turned cold, which it rarely did; at this rate my few clothes would last forever. I took a quick inventory, baited a line with some leftover strips of yesterday’s fish, and finally, with the inside of the frying pan for a mirror, gave my hair and beard a rough trim. There was no point in shaving and no place to get a haircut, but I tried to keep myself looking as little like a wild man as possible. Attracting undue attention was not consistent with doing nothing.

  The boat was small, flat-bottomed, and red. I tossed the oars into it, dragged it across the sand and into the water.

  “Dozen aigs and what-all else?” Clinton Mackey said this to me once every six days, never altering a syllable. This was one of the things I liked most about him. There were around two hundred persons living on Mushroom Key and the surrounding small islands, but it was a rare day when I spoke to anyone but Clint or his wife or daughter. When a man has only one conversation a week, it ought to be safe and predictable.

  “Dozen eggs to start,” I said.

  “A dozen is twelve, fresh from the hens.” He put the carton on the counter. “I swear you must never get out of the sun. Must shine at night where you are, sun night and day. You get any darker, I won’t have a choice of serving you or not. You get any darker, federal government’s gone tell me I got to serve you.”

  This, too, was an invariable part of our conversation.

  “Sausages? Two pounds?”

  “Right.”

  “Oranges?”

  “Still have plenty.”

  “Cooking oil?”

  “Got some.”

  “Cigarettes? Hell no, you don’t smoke. ‘Less you started since I saw you last?”

  “Not yet, Clint.”

  “Cause the Lord said no,” he said. When I had first started coming to the store, Clinton Mackey had tried discussing current events with me. Politics, inflation, the state of the world. I broke him of this by telling him that I was a religious person and didn’t believe in radios or newspapers or getting involved with more than one’s immediate area. Any mania is instantly excused in the name of religion; he now shut off his own radio the moment he saw me coming.

  “Fish line, fish hooks, fish anything?” I shook my head. “Bait? No, you use fish bait, don’t you? Catching much lately?”

  “Some.”

  “Whiskey? A quart of shine, which the Lord loves, it being a natural product?” My religion was a devious one. “Not the best I’ve ever stocked, but better than the last.”

  Two drinks every day before dinner, otherwise none. “My bottle’s running dry,” I said. “Better let me have a pint.”

  “Didn’t bring the bottle, did you? Course not, if it’s not altogether dry. Do you mind taking a quart? Thing is, I’m out of pint bottles, but I could pour out some soda bottles if you want.”

  “A quart’s all right.”

  “And bottled water, of course. Three gallons? Four?”

  “Three.”

  “Tins, now, you’ll help yourself.”

  I went over to the shelves of canned goods and picked out what I wanted, then selected a couple of pork chops and a steak from the meat cooler. Clint went down the rest of his list—String? Twine? Axe handle, whetstone, matches, bandaids, iodine? Coffee? Toothbrush, toothpaste, ’hesive tape? Batteries, dry cell or wet? And what-all else? Dozen aigs and what-all else and what did I forget?

  “Couple new books on the rack,” he added. “Might have a look while I pack this up.”

  There were no books that interested me. I had given up fiction long ago, and the two nonfiction titles on the rack didn’t appeal. One was philosophy, which I figured was just fiction without a story line, and the other was a basic guide to atomic physics; I read the first few pages and decided it would be too difficult for me. I still had almost half of The Lives of the Great Composers to read, plus a history of Australia and New Zealand.

  “Next time the book delivery comes, ask him if he can come up with a paperback dictionary.”

  “Damn, and he was just here, and you asked me that last week and I forgot. I’ll do that, though. I’ll remember.”

  I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted the dictionary. It was never that difficult to guess the meanings of those words which I didn’t know.

  Clint helped me carry the goods to the boat. I was able to dock just a few dozen yards from his store. We made two trips and filled the little rowboat with cartons. “Just about room in there for you,” he said, “and you can bet she’ll run lower in the water than she did coming over here.” This was another of the things that he always said.

  “Well, ’bye now.”

  “’Bye.”

  “And I’ll remember about that dictionary. Sorry for forgetting, and I’ll make a point to remember.”

  “If you happen to. If not, don’t worry about it.”

  “Man who worries loses his hair.” This was a joke—he was bald as a dozen aigs and what-all else. “Take care, now!”

  The boat rode lower in the water, which was certainly understandable, but not low enough to make any difference. He went back into his house and I rowed the boat steadily and evenly, putting my back into it, enjoying the way my muscles slipped at once into the proper meter. The sun was high in the sky, the sea was blue and still. It was good to be alive. It was really, honestly good to be alive.

  I had reached my little island as the occasional bits of driftwood did, by floating with the tide. Miami was no good at all. People, noise, music, hot outside and frigidly air-conditioned inside. I spent a very bad week there. That week would have been bad anywhere, but Miami made it worse.

  Eventually I got to Key West, and that wasn’t right either, but it was better than Miami. I compared the two and figured out what it was that made Key West better than Miami, and then it became easy to determine just what sort of place I was looking for.

  I got off on the wrong track for a while. I thought it might be ideal to live on a small boat, going wherever I wanted whenever I wanted. I went around pricing boats and decided I had more than enough cash to swing what I wanted.

  My list helped me. Buying a boat was spending money, and spending money wasn’t doing nothing. Buying a boat also meant owning a boat, and I had already figured out that the less I owned, the better off I was. If I couldn’t carry it with me or throw it away, I didn’t want it. And worst of all, a boat would enable me to move around. The one thing I wanted to do was stay in one place. Moving around is not doing nothing.

  So I let a few real estate men show me rental property on the smaller keys, and one of them took me around Mushroom Key. I was all set to take a small house there when the realtor’s motorboat passed a little island the size and shape of a football field, with a little weathered shack at one end of it. I asked what it was, and he said he was damned if he knew, but during the hurricane season it would blow to hell and gone. I asked who owned the island, and if anyone lived in the shack. He said he didn’t know. I told him to take me back to Mushroom Key directly. He tried t
o argue me out of this, and I told him if he didn’t do what I said I would throw him overboard and see if he could swim. He thought I was joking, so I threw him overboard. It turned out that he couldn’t swim, so I had to jump in and rescue him, but after that he ran me straight back to Mushroom Key without a word.

  And it was Clinton Mackey who answered my questions. Who lived in the island? Nobody. A man named Gaines had lived there, a wino, no one ever knew his first name, and several months ago he had disappeared. It was presumed that he had drowned. Who owned the island? Again, nobody. Well, the state, probably, but it didn’t really matter who owned it. Gaines sure as hell hadn’t owned it, nor paid a cent of rent on it, and he lived there without any trouble, except of course the trouble of drowning.

  I started moving in that afternoon. It took me two days to move in with everything I needed, and it took me just about a month to belong there. There was no particular day when it happened. There was just one day after another, exercising and fishing and reading the Do Nothing list, eating and sleeping and taking two drinks of corn whiskey before dinner, swimming and getting brown and rowing to Mushroom Key and back, until somewhere along the way I passed a point without even noticing it.

  The point of not returning, I called it.

  Because until then I had regarded all of this as a sort of emotional Operation Bootstraps, a self-guided course of therapy with an undefined but never-forgotten goal. Someday, I had thought, I would have it all sorted out, and it would no longer be necessary to stay away from the rest of the world. Some glorious day I would come down from the mountain with two tables of stone in my hands. Some day I would know what role I could best play in life, and I would be ready to play it.