by Robert Stone
Anderson’s teeth remained in place. “That’s pretty strange,” he said. “I mean, to talk about resenting someone for being alive.”
“It’s all relative,” Elliot said. “They might think, ‘Why should he be alive when some brother of mine isn’t?’ Or they might think, ‘Why should he be alive when I’m not?’”
“Oh,” Anderson said.
“You see?” Elliot said. Facing Anderson, he took a long step backward. “All relative.”
“Yes,” Anderson said.
“That’s so often true, isn’t it?” Elliot asked. “Values are often relative.”
“Yes,” Anderson said. Elliot was relieved to see that he had stopped smiling.
“I’ve hardly slept, you know,” Elliot told Professor Anderson. “Hardly at all. All night. I’ve been drinking.”
“Oh,” Anderson said. He licked his lips in the mouth of the mask. “You should get some rest.”
“You’re right,” Elliot said.
“Well,” Anderson said, “got to go now.”
Elliot thought he sounded a little thick in the tongue. A little slow in the jaw.
“It’s a nice day,” Elliot said, wanting now to be agreeable.
“It’s great,” Anderson said, shuffling on his skis.
“Have a nice day,” Elliot said.
“Yes,” Anderson said, and pushed off.
Elliot rested the shotgun across his shoulders and watched Anderson withdraw through the frozen swamp. It was in fact a nice day, but Elliot took no comfort in the weather. He missed night and the falling snow.
As he walked back toward his house, he realized that now there would be whole days to get through, running before the antic energy of whiskey. The whiskey would drive him until he dropped. He shook his head in regret. “It’s a revolution,” he said aloud. He imagined himself talking to his wife.
Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution—a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him. There would be damn little justice and no mercy.
Nearly to the house, he was startled by the desperate feathered drumming of a pheasant’s rush. He froze, and out of instinct brought the gun up in the direction of the sound. When he saw the bird break from its cover and take wing, he tracked it, took a breath and fired once. The bird was a little flash of opulent color against the bright blue sky. Elliot felt himself flying for a moment. The shot missed.
Lowering the gun, he remembered the deer shells he had loaded. A hit with the concentrated shot would have pulverized the bird, and he was glad he had missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself. As soon as he grew aware of the emotion he was indulging, he suppressed it. Pissing and moaning, mourning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug.
The shot echoed from the distant hills. Smoke hung in the air. He turned and looked behind him and saw, far away across the pasture, the tiny blue and red figure of Professor Anderson motionless against the snow. Then Elliot turned again toward his house and took a few labored steps and looked up to see his wife at the bedroom window. She stood perfectly still, and the morning sun lit her nakedness. He stopped where he was. She had heard the shot and run to the window. What had she thought to see? Burnt rags and blood on the snow. How relieved was she now? How disappointed?
Elliot thought he could feel his wife trembling at the window. She was hugging herself. Her hands clasped her shoulders. Elliot took his snow goggles off and shaded his eyes with his hand. He stood in the field staring.
The length of the gun was between them, he thought. Somehow she had got out in front of it, to the wrong side of the wire. If he looked long enough he would find everything out there. He would find himself down the sight.
How beautiful she is, he thought. The effect was striking. The window was so clear because he had washed it himself, with vinegar. At the best of times he was a difficult, fussy man.
Elliot began to hope for forgiveness. He leaned the shotgun on his forearm and raised his left hand and waved to hen Show a hand, he thought. Please just show a hand.
He was cold, but it had got light. He wanted no more than the gesture. It seemed to him that he could build another day on it. Another day was all you needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.
UNDER THE PITONS
ALL THE PREVIOUS DAY, they had been tacking up from the Grenadines, bound for Martinique to return the boat and take leave of Freycinet. Blessington was trying to forget the anxieties of the deal, the stink of menace, the sick ache behind the eyes. It was dreadful to have to smoke with the St. Vincentian dealers, stone killers who liked to operate from behind a thin film of fear. But the Frenchman was tough.
Off Dark Head there was a near thing with a barge under tow. Blessington, stoned at the wheel, his glass of straight Demerara beside the binnacle, had calmly watched a dimly lighted tug struggle past on a parallel course at a distance of a mile or so. The moon was newly risen, out of sight behind the island’s mountains, silvering the line of the lower slopes. A haze of starlight left the sea in darkness, black as the pit, now and then flashing phosphorescence. They were at least ten miles offshore.
With his mainsail beginning to luff, he had steered the big ketch a little farther off the wind, gliding toward the trail of living light in the tug’s wake. Only in the last second did the dime drop; he took a quick look over his shoulder. And of course there came the barge against the moon-traced mountains, a big black homicidal juggernaut, unmarked and utterly unlighted, bearing down on them. Blessington swore and spun the wheel like Ezekiel, as hard to port as it went, thinking that if his keel was over the cable nothing would save them, that 360 degrees of helm or horizon would be less than enough to escape by.
Then everything not secured came crashing down on everything else, the tables and chairs on the afterdeck went over, plates and bottles smashed, whatever was breakable immediately broke. The boat, the Sans Regret, fell off the wind like a comedian and flapped into a flying jibe. A couple of yards to starboard the big barge raced past like a silent freight train, betrayed only by the slap of its hull against the waves. It might have been no more than the wind, for all you could hear of it. When it was safely gone, the day’s fear welled up again and gagged him.
The Frenchman ran out on deck cursing and looked to the cockpit, where Blessington had the helm. His hair was cut close to his skull. He showed his teeth in the mast light. He was brushing his shorts; something had spilled in his lap.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est là?” he demanded of Blessington. Blessington pointed into the darkness where the barge had disappeared. The Frenchman knew only enough of the ocean to fear the people on it. “Quel cul!” he said savagely. “Who is it?” He was afraid of the Coast Guard and of pirates.
“We just missed being sunk by a barge. No lights. Submerged cable. It’s OK now.”
“Fuck,” said the Frenchman, Freycinet. “Why are you stopping?”
“Stopping?” It took a moment to realize that Freycinet was under the impression that because the boat had lost its forward motion they were stopping, as though he had applied a brake. Freycinet had been around boats long enough to know better. He must be out of his mind, Blessington thought.
“I’m not stopping, Honoré. We’re all right.”
“I bust my fucking ass below,” said Freycinet. “Marie fall out of bed.”
Tough shit, thought Blessington. Be thankful you’re not treading water in the splinters of your stupidly named boat. “Sorry, man,” he said.
Sans Regret, with its fatal echoes of Piaf. The Americans might be culturally deprived, Blessington thought, but surely every cutter in the Yankee Coast Guard would have the sense to board that one. And the cabin stank of the resiny ganja they had stashed, along with the blow, under the
cabin sole. No amount of roach spray or air freshener could cut it. The space would probably smell of dope forever.
Freycinet went below without further complaint, missing in his ignorance the opportunity to abuse Blessington at length. It had been Blessington’s fault they had not seen the barge sooner stoned and drunk as he was. He should have looked for it as soon as the tug went by. To stay awake through the night he had taken crystal and his peripheral vision was flashing him little mongoose darts, shooting stars composed of random light. Off the north shore of St. Vincent, the winds were murder.
Just before sunrise, he saw the Pitons rising from the sea off the starboard bow, the southwest coast of St. Lucia. Against the pink sky, the two peaks looked like a single mountain. It was hard to take them for anything but a good omen. As the sudden dawn caught fire, they turned green with hope. So many hearts, he thought, must have lifted at the sight of them.
To Blessington, they looked like the beginning of home free. Or at least free. Martinique was the next island up, where they could return the boat and Blessington could take his portion and be off to America on his student visa. He had a letter of acceptance from a hotel management school in Florida but his dream was to open a restaurant in the Keys.
He took another deep draft of the rum to cut the continuing anxieties. The first sunlight raised a sweat on him, so he took his shirt off and put on his baseball hat. Florida Marlins.
Freycinet came out on deck while he was having a drink.
“You’re a drunk Irish man,” Freycinet told him.
“That I’m not,” said Blessington. It seemed to him no matter how much he drank he would never be drunk again. The three Vincentians had sobered him for life. He had been sitting on the porch of the guesthouse on Canouan when they walked up. They had approached like panthers—no metaphor, no politics intended. Their every move was a dark roll of musculature, balanced and wary. They were very big men with square scarred faces. Blessington had been reclining, tilted backward in a cane chair with his feet on the porch rail, when they came up to him.
“Frenchy?” one had asked very softly.
Blessington had learned the way of hard men back in Ireland and thought he could deal with them. He had been careful to maintain his relaxed position.
“I know the man you mean, sit;” he had said. “But I’m not him, see. You’ll have to wait.”
At Blessington’s innocuous words they had tensed in every fiber; although you had to be looking right at them to appreciate the physics of it. They drew themselves up around their hidden weaponry behind a silent, drug-glazed wall of suspicion that looked impermeable to reason. They were zombies, without mercy, and he, Blessington, was wasting their time. He resolved to count to thirty, but at the count of ten he took his feet down off the rail.
Freycinet turned and shaded his eyes and looked toward the St. Lucia coast. The Pitons delighted him.
“Ah là. C’est les Pitons, n’est-ce pas?”
“Oui,” said Blessington. “Les Pitons.” They had gone south in darkness and Freycinet had never seen them before.
The wind shifted to its regular quarter and he had a hard time tacking level with the island. The two women came out on deck. Freycinet’s Marie was blond and very young. She came from Normandy, and she had been a waitress in the bistro outside Fort-de-France where Freycinet and Blessington cooked. Sometimes she seemed so sunny and innocent that it was hard to connect her with a hood like Freycinet. At other times she seemed very knowing indeed. It was hard to tell, she was so often stoned.
Gillian was an American from Texas. She had a hard, thin face with a prominent nose and a big jaw. Her father Blessington imagined, was one of those Texans, a tough, loud man who cursed the Mexicans. She was extremely tall and rather thin, with long legs. Her slenderness and height and interesting face had taken her into modeling, to Paris and Milan. In contrast, she had muscular thighs and a big derriere, which, if it distressed the couturiers, made her more desirable. She was Blessington’s designated girlfriend on the trip but they rarely made love because, influenced by the others, he had taken an early dislike to her. He supposed she knew it.
“Oh, wow,” she said in her Texas voice, “look at those pretty mountains.”
It was exactly the kind of American comment that made the others all despise and imitate her—even Marie, who had no English at all. Gillian had come on deck stark naked and each of them, the Occitan Freycinet, Norman Marie and Irish Blessington, felt scornful and slightly offended. Anyone else might have been forgiven. They had decided she was a type and she could do no right.
Back on Canouan, Gillian had conceived a lust for one of the dealers. At first, when everyone smoked in the safe house, they had paid no attention to the women. The deal was repeated to everyone’s satisfaction. As the dealers gave forth their odor of menace Marie had skillfully disappeared herself in plain view. But Gillian, to Blessington’s humiliation and alarm, had put out a ray and one of the men had called her on it.
Madness. In a situation so volatile, so bloody fraught. But she was full of lusts, was Texan Gillian, and physically courageous too. He noticed she whined less than the others, in spite of her irritating accent. It had ended with her following the big St. Vincentian to her guesthouse room, walking ten paces behind with her eyes down, making herself a prisoner a lamb for the slaughter.
For a while Blessington had thought she would have to do all three of them but it had been only the one, Nigel. Nigel had returned her to Blessington in a grim little ceremony, holding her with the chain of her shark’s-tooth necklace twisted tight around her neck.
“Wan’ have she back, mon?”
Leaving Blessington with the problem of how to react. The big bastard was fucking welcome to her but of course it would have been tactless to say so. Should he protest and get everyone killed? Or should he be complacent and be thought a pussy and possibly achieve the same result? It was hard to find a middle ground but Blessington found one, a tacit, ironic posture, fashioned of silences and body language. The Irish had been a subject race too, after all.
“I gon’ to make you a present, mon. Give you little pink piggy back. Goodness of my ha’art.”
So saying, Nigel had put his huge busted-knuckle hand against her pale hard face and she had looked down submissively, trembling a little, knowing not to smile. Afterward, she was very cool about it. Nigel had given her a Rasta bracelet, beads in the red, yellow and green colors of Ras Tafari.
“Think I’m a pink piggy, Liam?”
He had not been remotely amused and he had told her so.
So she had walked on ahead laughing and put her palms together and looked up to the sky and said, “Oh, my Lord!” And then glanced at him and wiped the smile off her face. Plainly she’d enjoyed it, all of it. She wore the bracelet constantly.
Now she leaned on her elbows against the chart table with her bare bum thrust out, turning the bracelet with the long, bony fingers of her right hand. Though often on deck, she seemed never to burn or tan. A pale child of night was Gillian.
“What island you say that was?” she asked.
“It’s St. Lucia,” Blessington told her. “The mountains are called the Pitons.”
“The Pee-tuns? Does that mean something cool in French?” She turned to Blessington, then to Freycinet. “Does it, Honoré?”
Freycinet made an unpleasant, ratty face. He was ugly as cat shit, Blessington thought, something Gillian doubtless appreciated. He had huge soulful brown eyes and a pointed nose like a puppet’s. His grim haircut showed the flattened shape of his skull.
“It means stakes,” Blessington said.
“Steaks? Like…”
“Sticks,” said Blessington. “Rods. Palings.”
“Oh,” she said, “stakes. Like Joan of Arc got burned at, right?”
Freycinet’s mouth fell open. Marie laughed loudly. Gillian looked slyly at Blessington.
“Honoré,” she said. “Tu es un dindon. You’re a dindon, man. I’m shitti
ng you. I understand French fine.”
It had become amusing to watch her tease and confound Freycinet. Dangerous work and she did it cleverly, leaving the Frenchman to marvel at the depths of her stupidity until paranoia infected his own self-confidence. During the trip back, Blessington thought he might be starting to see the point of her.
“I mean, I worked the Paris openings for five years straight. I told you that.”
Drunk and stoned as the rest of them, Gillian eventually withdrew from the ascending spring sun. Marie went down after her. Freycinet’s pointed nose was out of joint.
“You hear what she say?” he asked Blessington. “That she speak French all the time? What the fuck? Because she said before, ‘No‹, I don’t speak it.’ Now she’s speaking it.”
“Ah, she’s drunk, Honoré. She’s just a bimbo.”
“I ‘ope so, eh?” said Freycinet. He looked at the afterdeck to be sure she was out of earshot. “Because … because what if she setting us up? All these time, eh? If she’s agent. Or she’s informer? A grass?”
Blessington pondered it deeply. Like the rest of them he had thought her no more than a fatuous, if perverse, American. Now, the way she laughed at them, he was not at all sure.
“I thought she came with you. Did she put money up?”
Freycinet puffed out his hollow cheeks and shrugged.
“She came to me from Lavigerie,” he said. The man who called himself Lavigerie was a French Israeli of North African origin, a hustler in Fort-de-France. “She put in money, oui. The same as everyone.”
They had all pooled their money for the boat and to pay the Vincentians. Blessington had invested twenty thousand dollars, partly his savings from the bistro, partly borrowed from his sister and her husband in Providence. He expected to make it back many times and pay them off with interest.
“Twenty thousand?”
“Yes. Twenty.”
“Well, even the Americans wouldn’t spend twenty thousand dollars to catch us,” he told Honoré. “We’re too small. And it isn’t how they work.”