I’ll get it, she kept thinking about the shark. I’ll kill it. Bait me up again, she told Eville, but it was time to go.
Overhead, scudding clouds heralded the arrival of the front and the afternoon, now late, cooled and darkened. The ride back to camp was filled with the agonized jubilation of cheated fishermen, hooked into the dream only to see it stolen. At the tent and without modesty they changed into dry, warmer clothes, jeans and long-sleeved shirts, drawing their eyes along the length of each other’s bodies, her lust no more inhibited than his.
She started a fire with the last of the wood while Eville went behind the dunes to scrounge more fuel, coming and going until he had a pile sufficient for a bonfire. She melted butter with garlic and steamed the clams and they popped them into their mouths and chewed, exchanging lame jokes about the female attributes of bivalves, lewdly licking the labia, making pussy puppets, chasing their merry vulgarity with the last of the tequila. She was getting loaded, and so what? Why not? she told herself, her thoughts boozy, zinging, swooping, mean little birds. This time he wanted her too, what could be more obvious, had in fact always wanted her as all the men seemed to want her, a man prize, alpha only need apply, their wanting no secret or mystery to a beautiful woman, beauty’s curse until it wasn’t, every guy on your leg like a glaze-eyed dog. A thousand, Get offs! for each Climb on. In Haiti in Cap-Haïtien Burnette had looked at her ruefully and asked, Are we friends? She was amused.
What’s so funny? Eville said.
Nothing.
Why are you laughing?
I don’t really know. Us?
Yeah, he said and chuckled along.
At sunset the wind began to rise and the ocean boom and she stood at the tailgate cutting yellow squash and onions into a foil packet with butter, which she threw on the coals to cook while Eville pan-fried the odd but substantial scraps of salvaged red drum. With the cooking done and the sand blowing, they were forced to retreat to the cab to eat their dinner, bringing along cans of Coke and the bottle of rum, Dottie’s appetite returned with a vengeance that matched Eville’s quotidian hunger. Jesus, so good. Damn right, they chorused, fuck the shark, slurping on their drinks between mouthfuls, watching sparks shower away like burning hornets from the fire into the gloom as night descended with the heart of the storm. By the time they put their empty plates out of the way on the floorboards and decided to retire to the tent they were, after hours of merry drinking, bad dancers interpreting the wrong disaster, more earthquake than gale, staggering out of the truck, Dottie falling over Eville falling down, the two of them hee-hawing, pretzeled together.
Rain spattered in intervals; the wet wind flapped and cracked like wool blankets shaken by giants. Lying down inside the tent they listened to the roar, staring like insensate beings at the dome above as it jerked and convulsed, as if someone stood outside beating it with a paddle. Dottie had just enough sense to ask if they should relocate their shelter higher up in the dunes but Ev, the boy from the mountains, thought they’d be fine where they were. Should I turn on the lantern? she slurred, but he rolled against her and her body seemed instantly a type of carnal sponge absorbing a superheated flow, the divine pressure of a man’s length against her own, this heavenly thermal exchange of hidden energy, the body’s best secret. My God, to be touched!
He began touching her, its specificity breathtaking, and she hastened to unbutton her shirt and his mouth followed his hand to a nipple and in the dark whether she closed her eyes or opened them made no difference. Light-headed and quivering, she pulled him hard against her. Kiss me, Burnette, she whispered, and he started to, his mouth smearing along her jaw until it discovered her lips, her tongue poised to go inside, one of his legs prying between hers. Then a downburst of wind seemed to detonate the tent, collapsing the dome, the rain raking the fabric like buckshot. A bolt of nearby lightning revealed a snapshot of Eville’s face frozen above hers, cross-eyed with intoxication and exasperated with the interruption. Sober or not, he was a man who rallied to a crisis and he was up and outside in an instant, leaping instinctively around in the downpour, lashing the tent to the truck to keep it from blowing away while she lay on her sleeping bag, her hands folded atop the denim over her crotch, thinking, Hurry back, what better accompaniment than this, what better orchestra, the smashing urgency of it all. She undressed and waited and when he came back, thoroughly soaked and dripping, pelting her with shocking droplets, she helped him tear off his sodden clothes, saying, Here, pulling him back onto her, come here, let me get you, warm you, warm up, but as they kissed she wrenched her head away, alarmed and gasping, and pushed him aside because his weight had settled her down into the soaked bottom of the sleeping bag, the floor of the tent turned sloshy with the storm tide beginning its surge across the beach.
They threw everything but the ruined bedding into the duffel and sprinted through the flood to the truck, buffeted and rocking in the wind, flinging themselves into the cell of the cab, too stunned to say anything, naked and freezing and addled. She dug towels out of the bag and Eville started the truck to blow heat into the space and they wiped themselves off and struggled into dry clothes and sat back silenced in the din, exhaling their mutual impotence. Eville flicked on the headlights, the nearby tent barely visible in the downpour, soupy water streaming past its puny island. He put the truck in gear, forgetting the tent secured to its frame, and edged ahead through the maelstrom until he found a terrace higher up in the dunes and parked and cut the useless lights and pronounced them safe and secure. Crazy, huh? she said mirthlessly. The bad news was the beer was outside in the cooler and they were out of cigarettes. The good news was dry pillows and she gave Eville one as he reached behind the seat to extricate an old malodorous grease-stained blanket from a moldy heap of cleaning rags and tools, and there they huddled, the world outside seething with its violent harmonies, supreme and impersonal and mindless, the two of them, almost lovers, resigned to a squirming, fitful night—worse—of almost sleep, rousing themselves at dawn to behold a new world, an awesome world, midstream in the deluge, water triumphant everywhere below, the spine of dunes their Ararat.
What she saw, the entire beach, had the appearance of a washtub overflowing, snowy with suds, skittering balls of foam leaping into the air as far as the eye could see, the ocean a roiled slate-colored mountainscape of successive peaks, every summit hosting an avalanche, the atmosphere what she knew painters would call Payne’s gray, the bluish dark gray color of a tempest gathering or expiring, the assault of the clouds slowed from invasion to occupation, the rain slackened to an apathetic drizzle. She gazed at the panorama in wonderment, feeling unexpectedly well, perhaps finally on the other side of the torment of her withdrawal, a little raunchy from the daylong indulgence of liquor and the night’s accommodations but clear and unchecked in her overall sense of body and spirit. Eville, obviously, looking pale and hungover, was a different story in the aftermath of the night’s excesses, shambling off behind the dunes.
Dottie exchanged her damp and rumpled clothes for the ill-fitting orange bikini, splashing across a slow river of ankle-deep surge to the ocean and its daunting upheaval, pausing respectfully at the edge of the spume, the furious shore break and its lethal riptide, before stepping in just far enough to yank down the bottom of her suit, relieving herself quickly, her pants still lowered when a wave she had not anticipated reared behind her, towering overhead at twice her height, sucking her up helpless into its bilous yellow-green curl. Then it broke and trampled her like an elephant, her body bounced and tumbling and pounded, the top of her head rammed against the bottom, seeing stars and tiny tendriled threads of lightning, having the strange panicky thought that she had lost her grip on her father, allowing him to be swept away, until the whitewater deposited her with a final flipping smack far up onto the beach, her fingers clawed into the sand to keep herself from being sucked back out. Her suit was somewhere else, ripped off, oh, well; where
’s my Botticelli? she thought, spacey and nonchalant, standing up with whimsical defiance, re-creating the Venus pose, shielding herself, an arm across breasts, the other dropped to cup her pubis, Oh, the shame! You little tramp! she teased herself, that thing that would have killed her long ago if she hadn’t gotten rid of it, willing shame from her psyche, a smothering friend turned foe. She executed a girlish liberating half-pirouette, chortling, and began to shake the water out of her hair but stopped because the motion made her dizzy and her neck stiffened with pain.
She touched her forehead and there was blood, a small trickle from a small abrasion, not worth considering. Then, fully realizing the stark sublime beauty of her isolation, she began to walk up the flooded beach in a state of tranquil ecstasy, nearly out of sight of the truck when she began to sense something was very wrong, very confusing, existence itself disrobing, and she lay down in a few inches of water to quell her sensation of spinning but the spin remained and she closed her eyes but the spin accelerated. Maybe I have a concussion, she told herself. That would explain what’s happening. When she opened her eyes again the clouds in the sky whirled into a vortex, melted and drained, leaving behind an express train of sunlight and shadows, strobing at a pace so rapid it seemed to hypnotize her and when she closed her eyes again it was a mistake, filling the vision behind her eyelids with uncountable flashes of simultaneous lightning, the balls of her eyes deflating. She felt sharp pellets of glass nick her teeth, like a rodent biting her mouth, she felt her lips stinging and a scream locked in her throat and time smashed into a million phosphorescent splinters of braiding memory. Am I dying, did I die, am I dead? she thought, reassuring herself, No, that was a trick, dying was a trick, you’re fine.
Then, what?
She was being tumbled again, not by water but by time, which made no sense, to be time’s prisoner and yet not, to be outside as well, beyond the burden of chronology, oblivious to the count of the days, where time was amorphous, porous, popping up here and there and everywhere, everything happening all at once. I’m naked and lying on the beach, she told herself, but she was aware of an impossible connection, there was one beach but not one now, the trick seemed to be time itself, you could think this way but it was not real to be this way. I’m lying on the beach, she insisted, but something’s broken, something’s wrong, how do I fix it, what do I do? Oh, she said with great relief, I get it, I’m dreaming this incredible dream and Eville was inside of her, they were nuzzling, smeary with sweat, the taste of him salty as she licked his chest, then she was poised to come and she was almost there and then she was there, her orgasm running like a shiver through the timbers of a ship. Wow, she thought, opening her eyes, if that wasn’t real, then—but it was too real, the walls of her vagina swollen shut with pleasure.
She could see the sky again, the vestiges of the storm clearing off, and she had one of those rogue memories that didn’t fit, which seemed to skip ahead, Eville telling her he didn’t know how to love her and she asking why are you taking so long and Ev, laughing, saying sweetly, I guess I’ve run out of options.
I’m lying on the beach and I’m dreaming or I’m dead, she thought. Prescient, clairvoyant, hallucinating, delirious, insane. Then a compulsion to pray became irresistible, and she found herself in a familiar sanctuary, kneeling in St. Luke’s out in Langley with her family, the church packed with a congregation of families much like hers, the ossified OSS crowd and the graying Cold War crowd and the new crowd and her crowd, the spiritually slothful and the divine firebrands, and she bowed her head and prayed, Dear God, I want them all dead, but a modern person could not pray for this. Pray for enlightenment and tolerance, pray for democracy and justice, pray for her father’s salvation. Lord, forgive me, I am a deadly wayfarer, the means by which sin enters this world, the vessel willing to carry forth the corruption. Is it true, Lord, only angels can fight the devil? Has that worked well for you, Lord? I stand and face your enemy. What shall you have me regret? My father, Father? Where is the time for that? Would you replace my hate with nihilism, oh, Lord? What shall you have me sacrifice—but it was never a question of how far she’d go. Kill them all, she prayed, and paused, reconsidering a possible correction, a potentially definitive flaw in her understanding—perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low somehow lost their humanity—and so she prayed that no god was listening, she prayed she hadn’t been heard. At last she prayed, We must be patient until love turns. Amen.
The sun broke through the clouds to stay and warmed her body and the water began to retreat and she wanted to rise but for some reason could not until Burnette, dependable Burnette, the good soldier, came to her rescue.
I’m here, he said and stooped to take her hand.
I was waiting for you, she said. You found me.
Let’s get you up, he said, and she never felt more grateful in her life, or properly loved, than when he pulled her up and they walked on, the headwinds fresh and ever lessening, the world receding in their wake, faded into haze.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Friday morning as he broke camp Dottie stood on top of the dunes, checking in on her satphone, and she skipped down after a few minutes saying, He wants to talk to you. Eville took the receiver and listened, confused, to hear her father rip him a new one for the vanishing act he had just pulled off with his daughter. Then abruptly Chambers changed his tone, assured him not to worry, Remember I’ve given my word, a gift like gold, incapable of devaluation. He had the situation in hand, he said, but for the moment they had to deal with a temporary glitch, an interagency overlap, Bureau agents down in Fayetteville knocking on Burnette’s door with perfunctory questions about the death of Renee Gardner, nothing to be concerned about, trust me, said Chambers. An episode of miscommunication, not investigative zealotry. Inevitable that your name would come up but you’re covered, said Chambers, your command is heads up on this. However, I think it wise you remain unavailable for several more days. Bring my daughter home and by the time you get here this inconvenience will have disappeared into its natural tangle of ego-webs and protocols.
Roger that, sir, said Ev, and the undersecretary said, Good, I’ll see you tonight then.
He snapped the phone back into its cradle and disconnected the system, thinking, Inevitable, right? Why didn’t I see that coming? and Dottie asked if something was wrong and Burnette said he wants me to give you a ride to Virginia.
Really? Why?
He didn’t say. Maybe he wants us to have a chance to get to know each other.
That might take some time, she said, flashing a cagey smile and he told her it was beginning to look that way, wasn’t it, and they finished packing and rode the Green Grass back to the mainland and caught the Cedar Island ferry to Ocracoke, where they drove out onto the beach again to fish and swim, an encore for their evolving dispositions, but the run had been pushed south by the storm, which had left behind magnificent rollers, the water transparent again and restored with an aquamarine tint. The day was hot and bright and the fish nowhere to be found and after several hours they decided to drive back down the beach a mile or so to a break they had noticed where the swells hit a sandbar about fifty yards offshore and popped straight up into a body surfer’s version of paradise. She had been fishing in running shorts and a T-shirt but the weekend crowd had yet to arrive so they both stripped down and dove in and swam to the bar and walked out to where it dropped off again and lined themselves with the peaks and started riding them in, shooting out of the curls, human torpedoes propelled toward the beach in a joy-filled surrender to catastrophe, getting to their feet to hoot and cheer and going back out and doing it again and once more, once more. Then on his last wave he came smashing to shore, his back wrenched by the impact, and looked aro
und for Dottie, who had pulled out of the same wave and held back. When he spotted her again he saw her mermaid’s form suspended in the wall of a gigantic swell, her body vertical, hair like a crown of fire, her arms outstretched, not wings but the bones otherwise meant for wings and beautiful, she was so beautiful inside the wave, but then like a target flipped up at a carnival’s shooting gallery, suddenly ascending to her right she had company, a mako shark, its split tail fin only a few feet away from her hip in the screen of the wall, its shape silhouetted in the refracted light, its length easily twice her length, and there they were, embedded inside the wave like objects in amber, beauty and the beast, the image frozen for a second before the wall spit its curl and collapsed and when her head finally bobbed up in the foam and he saw she was safe in the shallows, what he had seen remained like a panel in a painting, the otherworldly juxtaposition gesturing toward something mystical but profoundly unstable and hopeless—the girl, the shark, the rising curtain of underwater light, the moment of suspension, the cosmic wink, the clap of erasure.
When he told her about it she said, I’ll bet that happens all the time. They’re always out there. We just don’t know it.
They head for the Hatteras Inlet ferry in the late afternoon, Dottie delighted this time by their day of ferrying from island to island, standing in the bow together here, now, leaning into him, Ev daring his heart to wait and see, looking at her and thinking with a vague uneasiness how normal she could be sometimes. She smiled and reminded him of what he had said back in Fayetteville about the cure.
A week ago I was a burnout.
Really? he teased. How did I miss that?
They stopped for dinner at a restaurant in Hatteras Village and arrived on the outskirts of Norfolk well after dark. When she said, We’re not in a rush, are we? he readily let her convince him to exit off the bypass to spend the night in a roadside motel. They began in the bathroom, showering together, Dottie hooking a slippery leg behind his granite thighs, balancing on the ball of her left foot, en pointe, to let him enter her, the entering the strangest black magic of all, taking her away to an obliterating nowhere. She changed positions, facing away, her hands flattened against the tiles, arrested, her face upturned and contorted in the spray, the sound she made a wincing feral gurgle, like ecstatic persecution, as he slapped against her flesh, Dottie pushing back against the plunge with extraordinary force. Then on the other side of the blowout she sat like someone hypnotized on the edge of the tub to shave the week’s growth of bristle between her legs and Eville, kneeling, asked if he could do it, his tongue replacing the razor after the final careful strokes along the puffed ridge of her vulva, then she was thrusting against him with a violence he would never have imagined from a woman, coming from there, the bone at the top of her pussy hitting his mouth like a mallet, his teeth cutting the inside of his upper lip, then they were flopped on the bed, Eville trying to hold on and keep his cock plugged in, her body in some type of convulsive escape trance thrashing from the foot of the mattress to the headboard, her hands blindly clawing the sheets until he had ridden her over the side and onto the floor and she shuddered and kept shuddering and thought she was done but the aftershocks would not stop coming. He shook himself out of his own daze and returned to the bathroom, wiping the steam from the mirror to trim his new beard to a more acceptable goatee, but his hands were unsteady and she came in and saw what he was doing and took the scissors and razor from him to repair his hack job. We’re becoming a real ma-and-pa act, aren’t we, he said and Dottie smiled, Yeah.
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