by Robert Stone
Security officials had canceled a bird census for the duration of the conference, not that anyone could see a bird that week. It was a gesture by the Secretary's office. They were contemptuous of the sort of folks who might object to the cancellation, as they imagined such people. Around the Secretary's office they imagined such people a lot, and felt certain that the fine, all-believing yeomanry they claimed to represent hated such people as much as they did.
The trip over to Steadman's was agonizingly slow. The small two-deck ferry proceeded through swells that presented a glassy surface but set the boat into long fore-and-aft glides. The dope was good for nausea, so Eric found himself a gear box and let the breeze carry his smoke over the wake. There was nothing to be seen except the water; everything else was invisible, even the squawking gulls that attended the ferry. When, after an hour and a half, the boat eased into the island's principal town, Eric had no idea what the place looked like. His first sight of the island as the ferry came about to tie up was of Feds in raincoats on the dock, backed up by armed Navy men in jump suits. He flicked his roach into the harbor.
The houses of town were white clapboard, and there were a couple of old buildings with cupolas out of Currier and Ives. Putting the place together was akin to a blind person's feeling out an elephant, so thick was the going. It was not so hard to find a liquor store. There, a glum Portuguese man sold him two bottles of California cabernet for an all-time record price. The wine would be his house offering, one he ought to have bought off-island. He bought cigarettes too, Marlboros, the red-and-white packs that had once bought taxi rides across emerging nations. These also cost a lot.
The liquor store clerk gave him directions to the Shumways' house, which turned out to be not far but an uphill trudge. He was a little unsteady on the way. After a few minutes of walking he turned to look down on the harbor, but of course it had disappeared behind him. No up, he thought. Neither down nor sideways. It was liberating, the complete obscurity. Past gone, present solitary, future fading out. A crazy little whoop of joy inside. Must be a rush, he thought.
At twelve-step meetings and to nurturing females Eric liked to give the impression that dreadful sights had brought him to the booze- and drug-examined life. He liked, in fact, to give himself the same impression.
In his heart he knew better than to blame his ways on bad experience. No one would convince him that character was fate; he had seen too much of each to believe it. Everyone was tempted by bad choices great and small, everyone was subject to bad luck. But he had always been a boozy, druggy person, and he would have been one had he lived to middle age in the bosom of mercy itself.
All at once he thought he heard laughter, somewhere distant, at the heart of the fog. Laughter and convivial chat, a strong sound carrying many voices. Something about it made him shudder. Then the voices were subsumed in the rattle of dead leaves underfoot and his interior noises. For all he could tell the laughter had started there. Listening for whatever it was, he became aware of the foghorn on the island. He had been hearing foghorns for hours. He incautiously took the second joint out, turned from the breeze and lit it for two quick tokes.
After a few minutes the slope evened out and the blacktop road he followed looked recently surfaced. He saw that there was an old house on his right, fronted by moss-covered old stone, and beyond that a sagging porch with a defunct oil furnace sitting on it. There was a light on in the back. He walked on and saw more houses, widely spaced on both sides of the road. They appeared and disappeared behind him. Then he heard singing, the real thing, a single voice.
Steps on, he came upon a young woman in gardening gloves cutting and gathering flowers, pulling clumps of nettle and pigweed as she worked. She was tall and pretty with graying black hair. No kid was she, but she seemed very youthful.
She looked up and saw him step out of the fog and put a hand to her hair, which was to him—as they said at AA—a trigger. Her eyes were blue, her look unguarded. She seemed to be shy and sweet and much nicer than his former girlfriend.
"Hi, Annie," he said to her. "Eric." They shook hands. "What kind of flowers?"
Annie had chosen mainly asters, zinnias and gerbera daisies, all of them dripping wet. Gathering flowers, which was something Annie did all season long, never failed to remind her of the days in her childhood when she was appalled at cutting them at all. She was practically ten before she could truly believe that they did not experience pain. The thought came back to her in various forms, borne on different memories.
She told him with a smile what kind they were. "I always think they have feelings," she said.
As she straightened up, he asked, "You think the flowers have feelings?"
"Well, not really." She brushed the soil and stems from her hands and smiled.
A chatterbox, he thought. Goofy like Lou, the ex.
"I understand. Too much pain, right?"
Annie affected to laugh heartily and turned away, blushing, toward the door. Eric followed her inside.
Taylor was sipping apple juice from a fruit jar at the kitchen table.
"This is Taylor, Eric," Annie told him.
"Neat," Eric said, glancing at the fireplace, at Taylor, and at the fifty-year-old furniture that had never made its way back to the mainland.
Annie hastened to display the garden flowers to her husband. "What do you think of these, Taylor? They'll work, don't you think?"
Taylor looked over his uninvited guest and burped rudely. He stared at the backpack Eric was removing.
"Good of you to join us, there, Eric."
Eric laughed as politely as he could.
A garlicky vegetable stew Taylor had made days before was simmering on the stove. "Eric is Lou's ex," said Annie.
"I heard," said Taylor.
Though he had passed forty that very summer, there was a quality about Taylor of late lingering adolescence. He kept staring at Eric's backpack.
Outside the kitchen window that looked on Annie's befogged garden, a male cardinal was fiercely attacking his own reflection in the glass. The cardinal was searching for a mate and was determined to drive off rivals. He had become obsessed by the house's windows; a tireless challenger kept appearing in them, matching him cry for cry, dealing him hurtful thumps. The bird's every sally was checked by this relentless enemy. But the love-driven red bird had heart. For days, from misty dawn until the dissolving of the light it had been fighting itself. Annie and Eric looked toward the window.
"Sad," Annie said.
"That's life, isn't it?" Eric said, turning to Taylor. Taylor looked at him without expression.
"It shouldn't be," Annie said.
Annie and Eric turned back to the window and then took a sneaking look at each other.
"Speaking of how life ought to be," Eric said after a moment, "I have some wine for us."
Annie blushed again.
"We don't..." she began.
"We don't drink it," Taylor said sharply. He stood up as Eric took his two bottles of cabernet out of the bag and put them on the table. Taylor took a pair of metal-rimmed glasses from his blue chambray shirt pocket. Then he picked up one bottle after the other and examined them.
"God damn, man," he said softly. He was looking at the price stickers over the labels.
One thing Annie had learned to live with was Taylor's anger. In her case, that anger threatened only her peace of mind because Taylor never hit her. He had, however, served twenty-three months in an Oregon state prison for an act of violence. During the period when she and Taylor had been eco-activists in the Northwest, he had responded to a taunt from a local logger. The response caused him to become one of the few individuals in that state ever charged, under an old frontier law, with the crime of mayhem, which the movement lawyers were able to plead down from felonious assault. Taylor's removable dental bridge had caused disfiguring damage to the logger's nose. Taylor was passionate, and in certain situations he could lose control. Situations involving alcohol were dangerous for him and
for others.
"God damn, man," he said again, and smiled. He had never replaced the bridge.
Taylor stood a couple of inches taller than Eric. Thin and tanned, he managed to look frail in spite of his size. He was long-necked, floating a prominent Adam's apple. His eyes were blue and bright. It was impossible not to notice the humps of muscle on his narrow shoulders and the rippling of sinew down the length of his tanned bony arms. He would never look exactly athletic, but the work he did as a deckhand on the island ferry had made him extremely strong. His hands were scarred and callused, the knuckles battered, split, fractured and healed over. He showed a high forehead, prominent cheekbones and a strong jaw. His fair hair was as soft and fine as a girl's, cut short and lying slack on the top of his skull like a tonsured knight's. Annie's sister, Lou, had described him as an ectomorph, a word previously unknown to Annie. It apparently meant a tall, skinny guy who brooded and couldn't drink. That was Taylor.
"Thanks, Eric," Annie hastened to say. "We don't drink wine."
Taylor thrust one of the bottles under Annie's nose to show her what the wine cost. Like everything else on the island, the wine was grossly overpriced. Taylor laid the bottle lengthwise on the table and rolled it casually toward where Eric was standing. Annie made a move to catch it if it fell.
"Wow!" she said. "Thanks anyway," she told Eric kindly. The prices were a little disgusting given the state of the world, but he had only meant to be polite.
"Waste of money," said Taylor. Annie saw that he might be at the point of tossing them outside, breaking them. But Eric had a corkscrew out. He took one of the bottles straight from Taylor's hand and uncorked it.
"Guess I'll have to drink them both then," said Eric, grinning.
Mainly to distract Taylor, Annie hastened to bring Eric a fruit jar.
"He'll just piss it out," Taylor said. "Won't you, Eric?"
"Ah!" Eric said. "But first the buzz! Right, Annie?" He raised his fruit jar to her.
It made Annie dizzy to watch him drain it. Of course it had been a mistake to let him crash at the house—she had known as much at the time. It had been a bad day for Taylor because there had been special trips for big shots on the ferry. Fog had grounded planes.
"Hey, let's eat!" she said with feigned delight. Taylor belched again, set his juice on the table and shambled to the stove. Annie watched him as though she were forcing him there by her will. "Veggie stew," she declared, "always better the second or third day." She looked at Eric, trying to convey anxiety, a warning, something to make him cool it.
Eric poured himself more wine, drank it and stood up.
"Going out for a smoke," he explained. "Be a second." He took the wine with him.
"What?" Taylor asked loudly.
Outside, the breeze seemed only to turn the enveloping fog on itself. The air was sweet. Eric felt excited but confused. What was with the looks Annie was giving him? Did she have a clue how lovely she looked with her guileless Oregon-blue eyes? She seemed innocent but mysterious. Clearly the husband was a menace. He was in danger.
In recent years Eric had tried to internalize a mechanism that controlled his impulsiveness. But he had gone on drinking and smoking too much dope, traveling too much. Strange thoughts assailed him. In Haiti, it might have been, or Indonesia—somewhere that powerful, perhaps infernal, supernatural beings roamed—he dreamed that an unmanageable spirit had entered into him. Flashbacks? Second adolescence on the way down? One never knew.
He smoked one Marlboro after another. Turning toward the Shumways' door, he thought, Make an entrance! An inappropriate urge, like so many. He opened the door dramatically to face them. Annie looked alarmed. Eric marched to the table and opened the second bottle of wine.
"Hey," he said. "Sorry, bad habit."
"Well," she said, "it reheats."
Taylor served the stew in silence, a somnambulist waiter. Eric noticed that the cardinal's struggles continued into darkness. He thought that unusual.
"Veggies, right?" Eric asked them. "Love 'em! Never eat anything with a face. Seriously," he asked them, "I mean, what is meat? A certain consistency to the teeth. A rub for the gums. Like chomp chomp, right? No more to it. Hey, guys," Eric said, "how about some more plonkorino?" He poured some into his fruit glass. "Overpriced? Yes! And yet? Not so bad."
Taylor had begun to smile unpleasantly. Eric looked at the plate before him. He took a forkful of the vegetable stew and put it in his mouth, as much to silence himself as anything else. He glanced at Annie. She seemed strangely calm.
"Hey, Eric," Taylor said finally, "why don't you tell us what you're really doing out here." Eric shrugged and kept his eyes on his plate and swallowed. "He's a wanderer," Taylor told his wife.
A wanderer, Eric thought. That was a good one. "The conference," he said. "At Heron's Neck."
"You ain't part of that shit, are you?"
"No." Eric tried to explain. "I came out to see ... what local people had to say."
"Local people?" Taylor asked. "What do you mean by that?"
"He doesn't mean anything," Annie said.
"I got nothing to say," Taylor told him. "Annie's got nothing to say neither."
"I might, Taylor."
"I should have been here earlier," Eric explained. "Fog. And I had you guys' address from Lou. And I wanted to maybe meet her friends. So I thought I'd call and say hi. So here I am. Tomorrow..."
"On your merry way?" Annie Shumway asked. "Up to the Neck and the conference? Hey, this ratatouille turned out really well."
"Well, no," Eric said.
She was watching Eric being overcome by the wine. He was ever so slightly like Taylor. Like her dad too, though not quiet and surely not violent. These people shouldn't drink. Like her dad. Scandinavian family on her side. Surely not violent, but you could never tell. She had discovered once that drunks were boring and unpleasant, and she had left Taylor once, before they lived on the island. Then the guy she had gone with had told her: Boy, that asshole—meaning Taylor—was work. He was your job, not a lot more than that. She had thought, Oh, I don't know. Because he, that guy, was also boring and unpleasant, and violent sometimes himself, not as brave as Taylor, and that turned out to count with her, as it did with most women. He was not committed to the world outside himself the way Taylor was.
She got tired of the guy mocking Taylor; she came to see it as mockery against herself. So love has no pride like the song says, and she had found out how ruthless she could be in a worthy cause, and she had gone back to Taylor, who took her back quite lovingly. They had moved to the island, and she had made people unhappy and she had helped people and she thought helping felt better, as was well known. So that was love for Annie.
"Veggies pretty good," she told the men. "Very nice, Taylor."
"The bird life is interesting here too." The word for Taylor's smile, Eric thought, was grim. Unless he had started imagining it, the cardinal was still at the window. "You a bird watcher too?" the grim ferryman asked. "You know," he asked his wife, "you remember the last pack of weird bird watchers we had?" He turned the rictus back on its subject. "They were Feds, Eric. They were government spies. Now, you say you're here for that conference. You say you're talking to local people. What's up, partner?"
"Well, not really." Eric proposed to explain himself further.
"Maybe you know something we don't, Eric."
Perhaps because of the bird outside, the dark Paraclete descended on Eric once again.
"Know something you don't?" He turned to Annie with a radiant countenance, then to Taylor. "That may be."
Taylor trembled.
"Taylor probably doesn't believe a lot of what he reads in the papers," Eric ventured, addressing Annie.
"You got that right," said Taylor. "I disregard the trash."
Annie watched, less anxiously. Having seen these situations before helped. Fraught as they got, they usually ended with some bloodless antler-rattling when she rallied herself to protect Taylor's feckless prey.
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Eric had fallen under the spell of his demon.
"This is wise," he said. "It's not just a matter of slanted perspective. It's a matter of arrant fictionalizing. They rarely get caught."
"He says it himself!" Taylor declared. "Admits it's all bullshit!"
"I've never heard it put that way, Taylor, have you?" Annie asked. "I want to hear." And she did, if she could not change the subject.
"Like those planes!" Taylor did not raise his voice but spoke with great passion. "That was faked, wasn't it? The planes into buildings. For oil, wasn't it?"
"There were no planes," Eric said.
"But wait," Annie exclaimed.
"I knew it!" Taylor shouted. He half rose from his chair. "No planes whatsoever!"
"No, Taylor," Eric said. "No planes." The force within him drove him to assume a wise condescending expression. An air, perhaps, of punditry. "Annie? There were no planes, do you understand?"
"But people were killed," Annie said. Taylor, triumphant, only grew more angry.
"Annie? Taylor? Have either of you ever heard of fractal imaging?"
"I have," Annie said. "I think." Taylor looked as though he were hearing something he had always known without quite realizing it.
"Did you know," Eric asked, "that in professional wrestling the outcome was always agreed to? The referee called the signals. This did not mean that people didn't get hurt." Eric chuckled. "Oh yes, Annie, people got hurt. Even killed. Did you know that the former Soviet People's Army accepted a four percent casualty rate in maneuvers?"
"This wasn't the Russians," Taylor said. "This was no maneuver."
Eric looked at the empty fruit jar and spoke thoughtfully. "That depends, Taylor, on what you mean by a maneuver. Think about it."
"What are you trying to do, man," Taylor asked, "make some bullshit excuse or something?"