Under Radar

by Michael Tolkin

  Tom knew there might even be a warrant out for his arrest, but not for the murder. Someone from the old Paul Farrar days might have come clean about the crime, or one of the good marriages unraveled and, in the rending, a lawsuit over community property unburied a numbered account, and too much money, and taxes due. Tom, a convicted murderer, could have taken blame for the whole conspiracy. Better to drive him up into a harbor in a small rubber boat, under radar’s sweep of the sea. Even if the Mimesis was spotted by the coast guard, the inflatable was invisible.

  With a signal from Jan, Eddie kicked the Mimesis’s diesel into gear, and the cat made headway, against the chance that a twist of the sea would bring the dinghy hard against one of the hulls. They were safely away, and under power, the boat accepted the weight of the men gracefully and rode the waves with less anxiety.

  The men had nothing to say to each other. They took comfort in the silent agreement to be silent. Both of them were wet. Tom sat on a garbage bag stuffed with dry clothes and his shoes. He never wore shoes on the Mimesis, and they were going to feel strange on his feet.

  Alan held a pair of binoculars. Three container ships, a half mile apart, waited to enter the harbor. Tom studied the ships and then pointed Alan to where he guessed the last ship would be in fifteen minutes.

  Now everything went the way they had hoped.

  The big container ship, their guardian, never knew the service it performed. Blazing lights on deck, the massive thing slowed down as it entered the channel. The little rubber boat, with no lights running, followed beside it past the breakwater. Alan steered the dinghy under the ship’s lifeboats, hiding them from anyone on deck. By instinct, the two men crouched low and whispered. Alan studied the harbor with his binoculars.

  “We have a problem,” he said. “There’s a fence around the port. We have to find a place where you can be let off and not cause attention. And there’s a coast guard station here, which means security. Better get dressed.”

  Tom stripped and dried himself with a towel from the garbage bag. Then he put on long pants, a tropical-print shirt, socks, and a pair of running shoes. The dinghy bobbed in response to his movements. They were close to the big cargo cranes, but they needed a small-boat marina, yachts, sailboats, a dockside restaurant.

  “Let’s just cruise,” said Tom. “Anyone can cruise.”

  They left the cargo ship. The piers were tall, and there weren’t many ladders to the water.

  What would they look like to anyone watching? Two boat bums on a ride from one piece of business to another. The dinghy moved with the forward energy that gives a passerby a little pulse of envy to see someone pushing steadily ahead on the water. Tom remembered the first time he’d seen the dinghy as he helped load the sail bag.

  “This is the best we can hope for,” said Tom, pointing to a floating dock beside a salvage yard, and a rotting cabin cruiser, Carpe Diem, settled uneasily in the water, her paint blistered and flaking, her brightwork rotten. “There are no businesses over here. And look, there’s a bike path around the yard, and the boats are locked behind a fence. This is the place.” He wanted to let Alan go back to the Mimesis. Jan and Eddie wouldn’t rest until Alan was with them, and he had a lot of sea to cover without the ballast of another man to hold the dinghy steady.

  “How do you feel?” asked Alan.

  “About?”

  “Coming home.”

  “Is this home?”

  “It’s America.”

  “I don’t have to close the circle?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Tom stepped to the dock. Alan reached up with his hand. “I’ll see you.”

  “Tell them I’m fine,” said Tom.

  Tom walked quickly up the gangway as Alan returned to the open sea.

  Aside from any other considerations, thought Tom, the chance for arrest, my strange destiny, Alan’s prospect for disaster in the waters between here and a catamaran five miles from the shore, this is fun.

  He slept that night in a twenty-dollar room at a seaman’s hotel near the water. He walked to Waikiki in the morning, the ground rolling under his feet. He was land-sick now, after so many weeks at sea. It was going to last a few days, and a walk would help him recover. And he was happy to walk. He was happy about everything.

  In the afternoon, he met Jan and Eddie and Alan at the bar of the pink Sheraton on Waikiki. They had passed customs easily but endorsed Tom’s caution.

  What a quartet! They looked famous, and all those who were watching studied them, trying to make sense of their aura of fame. What was the white-haired man to Jan and Eddie, and they to Alan? The four emanated confidence, a friendship stronger for survival of an ordeal, but what tribulation? They must be musicians, was the secret assay, and then those who stared, out of respect, stopped looking.

  Meanwhile, the four of them were just having a good time, rollicking sailors grateful for shore and another round of drinks. Jan watched Alan finish his third rum. “I didn’t know you had that facility.”

  “I’m learning.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re falling apart. That takes talent. Here you tell us the story of your life and you sound like a man with insight for a dozen, and now look at you. A sunburned rummy in a fancy bar.”

  “You rang?” said Eddie.

  Tom wasn’t drinking.

  “I’m going to stay and be a beachcomber,” said Alan.

  “Every tropical resort has a hotel called the Beachcomber,” said Eddie. “Think about it. Or a bar. Or two. The Beachcomber. The Vagabond. What do I say? Right. I’m drunk. Oh yes, this. Does anyone know what a real beachcomber looks like? He’s an unsteady drunk! He’s a man who gives so much thought to such local issues as the destruction and interment of memory that he becomes a university of one. Like you, my dear,” and he set his watery eye on his wife.

  “Are we fighting?” she asked.

  “Getting drunk and letting off steam. We’ve been cooped up. Everyone’s got a right. Tom, you got a right. Let it go. Get drunk, too.”

  “No,” said Tom. “I don’t want to.”

  “Eddie,” said Jan, “d’you want me to leave you? D’you want me ’a stay in Hawaii and let you finish the world by yourself?”

  “No, why?”

  “Because I’m not convinced of my own integrity anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  Alan giggled.

  “What’s ’at for?” asked Eddie. “Huh? You want to stay here? This is not a cheap place to be. You can’t just drop anchor here and pay the natives a couple of dollars for a bushel of passion fruit. This place costs money. Ain’t no barter in Hawaii. This isn’t Rancho del Nada on the Costa del Nowhere.”

  “I can manage,” said Jan. “Tom’ll sail to Mexico with me tomorrow.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Tom.

  “You don’t want to go with us?” They had been teasing each other, but Tom was serious, and Jan stopped playing.

  Eddie signaled to the waiter for another round by stirring the air with a finger pointed at the table. “Tom, you’re not going to stay here. We’re in America now. We’ll hit the California coast, anywhere you want, and you’re free. We can leave in a week. It’ll take us three more to get there.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Tom.

  “Why?” asked Eddie.

  From the bar he could see the hotel’s gift shop, where two teenage girls tried on sunglasses from a wire rack. They were sisters; Tom guessed the younger was starting high school, and the older would be just finishing, or a freshman in college. The little one bothered the big one to approve her shades, and the big one was too busy for her, but she turned to indulgently dismiss the younger by saying yes to the sunglasses before giving them a serious look. The younger, busy like a parakeet with her reflection in the rack’s small mirror, wanted only that yes and didn’t whine for real attention or sincerity.

  Their mother came out of the dressing room of the shop, wearing a tropical-print dress of big oran
ge flowers and green stalks on a white field, and the girls returned the glasses to the rack, running to judge the dress and each granting to the mother the enthusiasm they had just denied themselves. It was a silly resort dress the woman would never wear at home, too busy and unrefined, but in its very wrongness for home, the dress made the vacation that much more of a costume parade, and who doesn’t love a parade? Their mother asked the girls a question, and they pulled her to the sunglasses rack, and she bought them what they wanted. Spending money easily, they shared a vacation’s license for pleasure.

  Tom knew them. The mother was Rosalie, and the girls were his daughters. Tom made a quick calculation. Perri was nineteen, and Alma was fourteen.

  The drinks came.

  Tom excused himself. He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. His nose was broken. His hair was white. He had a beard. The face in his passport, ten years younger, how close was it? Who was that lawyer in a tie? The man in the mirror was gorgeous, in his face a shifting balance of agony and generosity, the tensions of a saint, but the man in the passport looked like a hundred thousand others. A woman could live with Passport Tom for the quality of a man’s reliable devotions; she would make peace with that face of dull symmetry, though her reach for higher love and closer friendship be thwarted. But Passport Tom was a secret criminal. He wondered, had Rosalie loved him for his secret life without knowing why? What part of her suspected his sins yet honored his self-control, that he could steal and still help the girls with their homework? Had she married him for the reasons that Paul Farrar chose him as an accomplice in the fraud, for his vicious greed under such bland skin? Married him with her own hidden double ceremony, a marriage between her private life and his? So had he betrayed her secret alliance with his secret soul by inventing an insult and then losing control over nothing? But it wasn’t nothing, not then. His daughter had been raped, in a way.

  But only in a way. The man in the mirror would not kill for the same reasons. But he might kill for others. Tom wondered, Would I still be a saint?

  In the mirror, he saw wisdom. In the passport, he saw no tact, no indication of manners refined enough to be religious. In the early face, there was no misery. There was still the face you see when you lean your head against the window in a train and you look through it to a river, and then you come into a tunnel, and for a moment you see yourself reflected in the window with the darkness behind, and you see how dull you are, how dulled by the world, how transparent, how focused only on yourself, how you consolidate the world only in your reflection, the constant repetition of all your narrow thoughts drawing a silhouette, the shape of your head the outline of the world’s missing purity. Now, in the hotel bathroom mirror, the difference was this: the face he saw in the mirror would know the tunnel was coming, it was just that kind of face, sagacity obvious and clear as a Gershwin tune, that face he saw would never be caught staring blankly out at nothing, into nothing. In his new face, he beheld no capacity for boredom, so his wife would never recognize him.

  Certainly the girls would never know the face of the man in the mirror. He would walk past Perri and Alma, to smell the air they filled, to inhale them. Had their mother allowed the girls a few photographs of him beside their beds? Daddy with the baby in his lap, Daddy swimming with the baby. Daddy with the girls on a ski slope. Daddy at the soccer game. Daddy and Mommy in Halloween costumes.

  What did they remember of that day in the Jamaican waterfall? Perri at nineteen, a freshman in college, what college? And Alma, fourteen, what is that?

  “I can see them,” he said. “I can take the risk.”

  Tom walked to the lobby.

  Rosalie and the girls were getting into a taxi. There was a man with them. Tom saw only his Hawaiian print shirt and khaki shorts. The taxi driver closed the trunk, filled with suitcases.

  Tom went to the head of the taxi line and told the first driver to follow Rosalie’s cab. “I think they’re going to the airport.”

  “International or interisland?”

  “I don’t know.” Tom had ten dollars in his wallet.

  Rosalie’s cab took the exit for the interisland terminal. “They’re going to another island,” said the driver.

  “It’s my wife,” said Tom. “She’s with another man.”

  “And you just found out?”

  “I’ve been following them.”

  “You’re not going to get violent on them, are you? I don’t want that in my life. I don’t want to drive you someplace and then you hurt someone. I’m a gentle person.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But you might. I’m going to let you off now so you can’t find out where they’re going. If she wants you to know, she can tell you.”

  Tom agreed with the driver, who pulled to the side.

  “No charge.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “You don’t know a thing, you don’t know she’s with him, you don’t know who she is. Don’t make this the disaster of your life.”

  Tom thanked the driver, and then he ran to the terminal. He was desperate but not crazy. He knew what he was, and it made sense to him. There was something he had to do, find his family. But why? What did he want from them? What would he do? That he couldn’t just introduce himself to Rosalie, that he couldn’t just sweep his daughters into his arms and absorb them into his love and regret; that he knew better, had this restraint, he now suffered to understand, was part of the problem. He could not easily insert himself into the drama of his family’s life on a vacation, or, God forbid, a honeymoon!, without ruining his daughters, and yet there was a man with them. Who was he? His wife had remarried. Sure. Of course she had to find another man, to give his daughters a father, and the man would be a good man, she would have made certain of that. His sister would have made certain.

  But even his sister could be fooled again.

  Rosalie came from a family of professionals, with doctors and lawyers in the family tree like apples at harvest. It took Tom no longer than two seconds at the hotel’s entrance to mark that the gestures of the man who got into the taxi with Rosalie and his daughters were irrefutably correct. Even the hair on his tanned arm was decorous. She had found a mandarin.

  But I am not sucking on my artificial sobriety anymore, thought Tom. I can drink if I want to.

  He wondered why this sentiment intruded.

  Because, because you have very little time to make yourself known to them, because you are wise now and can trust that your impressions of someone go directly to the heart.

  With each step, as he ran faster, he felt cooler, and when he reached the terminal, he registered no change between the humid windy air outside the building and the dry chill within. He trotted past the ticket counters, stood in the line for the security check, and was through.

  His daughters were together at a frozen yogurt stand.

  Easy to walk up to the counter. His daughters smelled of shampoo and something else, not perfume, he was sure, perhaps a scented water, something they’d sprayed on their faces from a sample bottle at the hotel gift shop. Or was it just their sunscreen? It didn’t matter at all, but he wanted to know, just to own something precise about his children.

  They were talking about music, about a band, the name meant nothing to him, and he was happy for them in the way they shared enthusiasm. They were beautiful, he was sure of it. Their tanned skin alarmed him, but if the vacation was over, why weren’t they on a flight to the mainland? So they’re tan. No, he thought, they’re on a tour of the islands. They’ve been here a week. He had a chance, but he didn’t know for what. The woman behind the counter asked him what flavor he wanted.

  He looked to the girls. “What’s a good flavor?”

  “Chocolate, I guess,” said Perri.

  “Or mango,” said Alma.

  “Then I’ll have a double scoop, one of each.” Neither girl turned to his voice as though hearing the resonance of an old bedtime story.

  The girls didn’t care and passed away
from his warm, indulgent smile, although Perri studied him for a second because he looked so interesting, so severe, perhaps.

  He followed them, which was easy to do in the crowd, and when they joined Rosalie and the new man at a gate for a plane to Maui, he left the terminal and went back to tell the news to his shipmates at the Sheraton bar.

  “And you want to go to Maui,” said Eddie.

  “Yes, I’ll go to Maui and I’ll find them.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Eddie. “There’s a lot of hotels on that island. And don’t forget the condominiums and houses for rent. It may not be so easy to find them. Maybe they’re staying with friends. You’ll never find them that way.”

  “They’re at a hotel,” said Tom. “I saw the man’s watch. It was expensive and not a common brand. He’s used to indulging himself. They’ll stay at a hotel and, I’d wager, the most expensive.”

  “A bet?” said Eddie. “You don’t have the money.” He winked, which meant, We’ll take you there, and let’s get on the boat now, because we don’t have much time.

  ...

  “What will you do once you find them?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you announce yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have very little money.”

  “Seven and a half dollars. I had ten, but I bought a frozen yogurt. “

  “Seven and a half dollars isn’t enough.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “You need a haircut and a shave. After you pay for that, you’ll have nothing left. Let us pay for that.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  ...

  The wind blew twenty-five knots on a purple sea of swells running eight feet high. He asked for the wheel and, guiding the boat on a broad reach, with the wind coming from the side, put the boat over the waves. Ahead of him was Maui, the final landfall with his old friends. He pointed the boat towards Lahaina, sitting above Maui’s waist, where the island narrows to a plain between two dead volcanoes hidden in cloud. A fringe of hotels stretched along the coast.

  While Tom looked at the place that might, at last, reveal his destiny, a whale broached the surface and slapped the water with its tail. Jan, Eddie, and Alan analyzed the vision; was it an omen? Did they believe in omens?