by Robert Stone
“All right,” Strickland said from the cement floor. “Take it.”
“You got no fucking respect,” Donny Shacks said to him. “That’s the trouble with you.”
When they were gone, he struggled to his feet and found that he could neither straighten out his back nor close one of his hands. His pain felt serious. He stepped over his splattered grocery bag and slowly dragged himself down the ramp that led to the garage. When he got in sight of the street and saw the traffic, he leaned against a guardrail and shouted.
“I’ll make it anyway! I’ll make it! Anyway!”
The strange thing was that although the garage section was active, with dozens of people coming and going, no one paid the slightest attention to Strickland. Bloody-faced, bent double at the waist, cursing, his crippled, broken left hand supported as in supplication by his right, he made for his car under the unseeing gaze of busy passers-by. It took him prodigies of effort to release the lock of his car and get the door open. Safely behind the wheel, he passed out briefly.
Reviving, he felt irrationally responsible for his own appearance. He wanted not to walk the streets and be ignored. Painfully steering the car with the heels of his hands, he drove down the ramps and pulled up in front of the cashier’s station.
The attendant in the booth was the same Latin youth who had been on duty when he returned from Central America. When he handed over his monthly rate ticket, the young man did not return it. Instead, he picked up his clipboard and went out to frown down at Strickland’s license plate.
“You can’t park here no more,” the boy told Strickland.
“What are you talking about?”
The youth, incensed, grew immediately hot-eyed. “What I said, man. You can’t park here no more. ’Cause the space ain’t available.”
Strickland looked at him for a moment and said, “I see.” There was no use in arguing.
Wearily and carefully, in the same heel-handed style, he drove across Twelfth Avenue and east on Forty-sixth Street, to park illegally in front of his loft building. He went in slowly, putting one foot in front of the other deliberately, bent-backed. He regretted alarming the pedestrians hurrying by and understood their situation. Not half a block away, three men had been shot down dead for interfering in a duly arranged murder.
Upstairs, he found Pamela chatting with Freya Blume. They were talking about furniture. Both women rose to their feet when he came in.
“What on earth?” asked Freya.
Strickland leaned against one wall and managed to speak. “I think I want a bath.”
“You need a doctor,” Freya said in a quiet frightened voice. “What happened to you?”
“Oh God,” wailed Pamela.
“I need a bath,” he repeated. “That’s all.”
But when he was in the bathroom with the tap running, he realized he could not manage it. He went back into the loft living room, sat down in a ratty armchair and looked out the window on the late spring evening. He still could not straighten out his back.
“I can’t let it go,” he told the two women. They were still on their feet, staring at him. “But I don’t know if I can do it now. But I’ve got to try, understand?”
“Roosevelt Hospital,” Freya said to Pamela. “Roosevelt-Saint Luke’s. We’ll take him in a taxi.”
“I have my car,” Strickland told them.
“The guys from the lab came and got the film,” Pamela said. “I let them in.”
“What guys?” Strickland asked. “What film?”
“The stuff from Owen’s boat. The UPS guys. They took it to the lab.”
“I never sent it to any lab. It was just videotape. I was going to copy it.”
“But these guys took it. It was on the marked ninety-minute spools. It said ‘Browne’ on it and they just sort of picked it up. All the stuff that had ‘Browne’ on it, they took.”
He got painfully to his feet, walked into his cutting room and saw at once that all Brownes tapes were gone. But it was worse than that. He had been keeping most of the original sound track from his film in a handy cabinet to make his own retransfer. The cabinet was marked BROWNE SOUND. It stood open and empty. “My sound,” Strickland said. “They got my sound.”
“Go to the police,” Freya told him.
“They’ve got my sound,” he said. “They’ve got the logs. They’ve got the tape.”
“Get a lawyer.”
“I will,” Strickland said. “Definitely.” All the footage he had taken of the Brownes ashore was secure in a laboratory vault. Most of it was silent now, and there were no tapes from the boat to match with it, and no logs. “But I don’t think it will help.” Almost certainly, he thought, salvaging a film from the remnants would prove beyond him. Such a thing would require vast ingenuity and measureless labor. At the same time, he was not at all sure he could keep himself from trying. He would have to sit in the dark and look at the mute dummy of the film that he had lost, and at the woman also. He might spend a lifetime.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so.”
He would fail, Strickland thought. There would never again be the old nonchalance of the hand.
“Come,” Freya said. “We’ll drive you.”
“Oh God,” said Pamela.
“You should call the police now,” Freya said as they hobbled toward the door.
“Right,” Strickland said. “The insurance.”
“What next?” she asked.
“I don’t know if I can do it now. But I’ve got to try.”
“Oh baby,” Pamela said. She looked fond and somewhat happier.
“I’ve got to get out of here. Set up somewhere. Maybe I can still do it.”
In pain, he stopped. They held him upright.
“God,” he said, “my hands are killing me.” One of them was especially swollen. He swallowed hard. “Or maybe . . . maybe I should just look for another number. Maybe it’s a nonstarter. Bad karma.”
“Really,” Pamela agreed.
“Anyway,” he said, “I can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” Freya asked.
He began to wheeze. They thought he was laughing.
“I think I’ve lost my parking space,” he told them.
68
WHEN THE MOVERS had taken up the last rug, Anne unfolded a beach chair and sat smoking in the middle of the bare white living room. The impulse to smoke again had come upon her early in the summer, out of nowhere but irresistible. Upstairs, she could hear Maggie weeping in her stripped bedroom, sitting on the floor with her back against one wall, clutching a bear. Seeing that clearly in her mind’s eye, Anne closed her eyes and brushed her hair back from her forehead. Her hair was finally growing in longer.
She had found a house for them outside South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It was an old house of the sort she favored, colonial, with a view of Buzzards Bay. There, Maggie could transfer to day school and live at home. Anne could prepare for the race. She planned to get under way during Maggie’s first year at college. Everyone had given up trying to talk her out of it.
Except for the smoking, she was sober. She had taken to going every night to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the Congregational church. Most of the other alcoholics in the meeting were men. There were soft pink suburbanites and a few proletarians.
Men seemed wary of her. It might be the wounds somehow visible, she thought, or it might be simply that they thought her hard. So she presently would be. Her sense of humor had become rowdy and somewhat unpresentable. Bitter, a little cruel. She was forgetting her schoolgirl good manners. Above all, she had become impatient.
In an old half-discarded briefcase she found the note she had forgotten to give to Owen. It had been mislaid in the confusion when he had been setting out. In it she had quoted from Romeo and Juliet:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
my love as deep; the more I give to thee,
the more I have, for both are infinite.
She could not imagi
ne transcribing such sentiments.
The stories about Owen’s voyage were coming out, in spite of her precautions. Captain Riggs-Bowen, who prattled endlessly about discretion, was a loose-lipped showoff who could not keep from seeking credit for what he thought he knew. It was all ironic and she supposed Strickland had been right after all. The fact was that he had understood. Who would have thought it?
No doubt, she thought, his movie would have been fine. She heard rumors through the magazine that he was still trying to piece something together. The world’s curiosity was well whetted. If it ended up on television, there was nothing she could do. But surely it would be easier not to go through all that. To be recognized everywhere and pitied, philosophized about, eyed year after year? No. Things were bad enough as they were. There were more important concerns than one smart guy’s career and the state-of-the-art movie.
She had inferred, from a dark remark of her father’s, that they had stepped hard on Strickland. She had not intended him injury but she did not pursue it. If true, it was one more thing to regret and be ashamed about.
In the grip of some confessional impulse she had inflicted the whole story on Buzz Ward, Strickland and all.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he had said.
She had said, “That doesn’t sound like absolution.”
“It’s not,” he had said. “Hell, no.”
Loyalty was honor itself to Buzz. In spite of everything, though, she felt he had in part forgiven her. He knew the turns things took. But perhaps it was wishful thinking on her part.
In her disorderly way, she remembered that unburdening as a nearly comic scene, and she had to wonder if one day they might not laugh about it together. Sex was absurd. Love was absurd.
One of the worst things was that sometimes she could not think of Owen as dead. She was pursued by a nonsensical nightmare image of him pinned to the horizon, outside of time and motion, suspended undead over the sea, the Dutchman. In that manifestation she could neither clearly recall nor forget his face.
She put her cigarette out in the coffee can that was serving as an ashtray. Upstairs, Maggie turned in her sorrow. The sound echoed through the empty house.
In her contemplation of pain, Anne found herself returning again and again to Owen’s mad logs. His idea of himself as a Sun Dancer particularly impressed her: him spinning, hooked, at noon, on the axis of the world. Now hearing Maggie’s foot on the stairs, she thought of it.
“Are you almost ready?” she called.
The girl did not answer at first. Anne turned to look and saw her daughter staring out a window toward the shore. Her teddy bear was thrust unsentimentally beneath her arm. She had a crazy false smile.
“I’ll be so glad to be out of here,” the girl declared.
“You must think of the good things,” Anne said. She knew that saying it risked a pointless argument for which Maggie would have a thousand times more energy than she. But they were at the point of leaving. It was as though the last minutes of the house required respect and reason.
“The good things,” Maggie said with a laugh. “That’s really funny.”
Maggie had constructed a four-line poem about her father that began: “Liar liar liar.” Her mother had continually to beg her not to recite it. She had read the logs.
Grieving, Anne watched her daughter’s ghastly pretense of saturnine amusement. With her high forehead and her honest grayeyed look, she was so like him. How could either of them, Anne wondered, ever imagine they would put anything over on the world?
Feeling a little faint, she lit another cigarette.
“You mustn’t say that, dear.”
“I know,” Maggie said. She spoke as though she were party to a private joke. Her eyes were brimming.
“Maybe you should have another look around the house,” Anne said to her daughter. “Just to make sure you have everything.”
“I’ve looked and looked,” the girl replied. They faced each other in the empty room. “Maybe you should, Mom.”
Anne found herself wandering listlessly through the blank rooms. One had been the dining room, another the study Owen had made for her. She went into the sunny kitchen.
“God,” she said aloud, “I can still smell that jerky.”
In her race, Anne thought, jerky was an item she would do without. Suddenly she found herself wondering if some of the food she had packed for him might have gone bad and poisoned him and caused his mind to go. It very often happened, when she turned the voyage over in memory, that she discovered derelictions and occasions for guilt.
She made her way back to the living room and stood behind the beach chair. She had known that leaving would be hard. It was important that she cope, she thought, for Maggie. Somehow she could not resist an attempt at comforting words.
“Mags,” she began. It was a false start. “Mags, you must not judge harshly.”
Helpless, she watched her daughter’s face give way.
“One day,” Anne said, beginning again, “I hope you’ll understand the kind of man your father was. He risked his life. He risked his sanity. He experienced everything. Very few men have ever done what he did. Very few men test themselves that way.”
Maggie turned away with a low moan. It was expressive, Anne understood quite well, of contempt and exasperation at her mother’s self-deception.
“One day you will, Mags.”
Maggie ran through the front door and into the street. Anne started after her, afraid for a moment that her daughter might go headlong down the hill, toward the tracks, the highway, the Sound. But Maggie was only running to the car. She huddled with her bear in the passenger seat.
Watching Maggie through the window, Anne remarked on how changed she had been in a year. She looked almost a grown woman, clinging to the ridiculous bear. I should have made her leave it, Anne thought.
Someday, one way or another, Maggie would come to terms with it. Until then she would suffer in confusion. Anne had to hope it would harden her, pretty guileless creature, Owen’s daughter, to survive the lovely illusions she would certainly embrace, the broken promises ahead.
For the race, Anne would be sailing a boat built in Wisconsin to her specifications, financed partly by her brothers, partly by the publisher of Underway and partly—she had discovered—by Harry Thorne. As the widow of a cheat, she had not even asked for corporate sponsorship. Everyone had been outraged, at first, at the risk. She had had to explain again and again that it was absolutely necessary, that it was a risk that must be taken. She was convinced that expiation was required and that their honor could be restored if she went to sea. There, she half believed, she might somehow find him and explain. The ocean encompassed everything, and everything could be understood in terms of it. Everything true about it was true about life in general.
Anne slept very little and accepted her wakefulness. She had learned to value the sunrise and the lightening hour before dawn. One morning she had lain listening to a white-throated sparrow chanting in the single living elm across the street. Everything seemed obviated in its plainsong. There were many around the house in South Dartmouth and she looked forward to that. She hoped land would be sweet to her when the voyage was over. She hoped to treasure the first landswell. She thought she saw a model for herself in the order and simplicity of the sparrow’s call.
She folded the chair and took it with her into the street and let the teak door swing shut behind her.
About the Author
ROBERT STONE is the acclaimed author of seven novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2006.
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