Dead Men Don’t Scare

Chapter One Sculduggery

Each morning he would sleep until he could not close his eyes again. Then he would roll out of bed, pull on the yellow swimming trunks, push the bedroom door open. Down across the soft hot sand he would walk, to the hard damp packed sand, until the surf was pulling at him, waking him up. He would swim past the line of breakers and float out there for a time on his back, his eyes squinting against the sun glare.

He knew that he was watched from the hotel because, each morning as he started to swim back in, he saw the white-coated waiter bringing his breakfast down to the cabana. Each morning he showered quickly in fresh cold water, rubbed himself glowing with a coarse towel. He breakfasted alone on the tiny private patio built in the corner of the L of the cabana, an opened book at his elbow from which he glanced up from time to time to watch the sea.

Every day was exactly the same and that was the way he wanted it, because coming back to life is a slow thing and a delicate one.

After breakfast he oiled his body and lay in the sun, swimming when the heat grew too strong. In mid-afternoon he walked far down the beach and bought a sandwich at the public beach pavilion. And, as the sun began to dip toward the horizon, he showered again, dressed carefully in one of the brand new lightweight suits, and climbed the stone steps to the hotel.

He took exactly twenty minutes for each martini, and each night he drank four before dinner. He drank alone at the end of the bar, watching the reflection of the customers in the back bar mirror. When he saw his own reflection he found that it had long ago lost the faculty of disturbing him. He saw a smooth, expressionless, thirtyish face, too bland, too good-looking in a stylized way, a spare body with more breadth than thickness.

The eyes, of course, were dead. Eight years. Four years slowly dying and four years quite dead.

Each night he had dinner at seven, one benedictine and brandy at the bar, and then went back to the cabana. He would sit alone on the small patio, unthinking in the soft night. Later he would read in bed for a time, and then go to sleep. Sometimes he awakened drenched in cold sweat, his pulses pounding, his eyes open so wide that the lids hurt. But it was happening less often.

Coming back to life is slow. Sometimes it is impossible.

Behind the dead eyes there was a hardness that he could feel and taste. It was a hardness that had been acquired, had been built up in tiny layers. Once there had been room in him for love and pity and joy. Once upon a time he had been able to feel the sting of tears at just the right bars of music, or right lines of a poem, or the look in the eyes of a woman. He had to find out if it was gone forever.

Part of trying to live again was the strange sound of his own name on his lips. Ryan Kestrick. Who was Ryan Kestrick? There was a small boy of that name, running and whooping across the red brick playground of a coaltown school. There was another Ryan Kestrick, a glib college kid with a tongue too fast, belligerence balanced too precariously on a strong shoulder.

But they were dead, and all the other incarnations of that name were dead and now it was time to take up that name again in a new, forgotten way.

Each day the endless sea thrummed softly against the shore. The stars were low each night. Between the swells there was the sound of the music from the hotel where they danced out on the terrace high over the sea.

He had come down from the hotel and he sat with his chair turned so that he could look up the pale beach, silver-touched with moonlight. He had loosened his tie and he sat there, his body pleasantly tired with the swimming, glowing with the heat of the sun that had been gone for four hours.

He saw her come down the stone steps, alone, slowly, holding up the hem of the white evening dress. He watched her in the way that one watches any creature that moves in a neat, balanced fashion, taking pleasure from the integration of movement. When she reached the bottom, she took off her high-heeled slippers and put them neatly side by side on the bottom step. He knew how the sand, still faintly warm from the departed sun, would feel against the soles of her feet.

She looked tall, but he had no point of comparison. Her tanned shoulders were dark against the white dress, the moonlit sand. She was forty feet from him. She seemed to look in his direction, but he knew that she could not see him where he sat in the angled shadow of the roof edge. Her hair was a black hole in the night.

She walked to the very edge of the water, to where each wave sent tongues of foam up the slanting sand. She stood and looked out across the black sea. She stood with her shoulders back. Ryan thought that she looked a bit like those figureheads they had once used on ships.

He frowned as she walked forward three steps and stopped again. The sea soaked the hem of the dress, splashing dampness up to her knees. Drunken fool, he thought. None of my business. She took another step.

It seemed to be a waste. He sighed, reluctant at this destruction of the evening, and walked across the sand. The water smashed across her, driving her back a step.

“You!” he called sharply over the sound of the sea.

She turned quickly. Against the pale oval of her face the brows were vivid black. “You spoiled it!” she said. Her voice was low but he heard it. She walked back up out of the water and stood in front of him. He looked down into her face. She was tall.

“Go ahead, if you want to. I thought you were drunk.”

“That’s psychology, isn’t it? Like telling the child to go ahead and break the window.” There was an angry edge in her voice.

He smiled. He said placidly, “Psychology? That’s beyond me. It’s simpler than that. As long as you aren’t drunk I don’t care what you do or why.” He turned back toward his chair.

“I don’t want to be treated like a child,” she said, following him.

He turned. “Please go drown yourself, honey.”

“You don’t think I have a good reason, do you?”

“Sure you have a good reason. Your man done let you down. Or your beloved is snuffling at the wrong front door. Or you lost the money for your poor sick old mother’s operation. You dropped it on that crooked wheel in the hotel basement. I don’t care what your reasons are. I told you that.”

She bit her lip as she swung hard at his mouth. He caught her wrist, stared at her for a moment. Her eyes glowed with her fury. “Mind your own business,” she said.

“I will,” he answered gently. He released her wrist and backhanded her solidly across the cheek. It knocked her down into the sand.

She lay where she fell, her hand against her cheek, her eyes wide. “You aren’t even mad!” she said in an awed tone.

“Should I be?” He walked back to his chair and sat down. She was on her knees, sitting on her heels, her shoulders slumped, her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook, but the sea muffled any sound of weeping.

Ryan watched her for a long time. “If you need a drink,” he said, “there’s a bottle inside.”

She made no sign that she had heard. He didn’t repeat it. After a long time she stood up and walked toward him. “Where is it?”

“On the shelf by the kitchen sink. Glasses in the cupboard. The light’s on your left as you go in.”

The living room light clicked on. It shone out the windows onto the sand, dimming the moon. After a long time she spoke at his elbow. “I fixed you one too. Here.”

Ice clinked against the side of the glass. She pulled the other chair away from the shadows into the moonlight and sat down.

She sipped her drink. “My face hurts,” she said.

“Does it?”

“Who are you?” she demanded. “What sort of man are you?”

“The sort of man who wishes I’d let you alone when I first saw you.”

“Why does your voice sound so tired?”

“I am tired. You’ve had your drink. Now go put your shoes on.”

He saw the broad-shouldered man in the white dinner jacket reach the bottom of the steps. The man bent over and picked up the shoes. The girl was plainly visible in the moonlight. He came slowly across the sand toward them.

“What do you want, Rolph?” she snapped.

“Sam is ready to leave, Gria. It makes him nervous to be held up. I’ve been looking for you for a half hour.”

“Suppose I don’t want to leave,” she said.

The stranger had a wide, heavy-boned face, a small black mustache. His voice was metallic, as though it came through an amplifier. He threw the shoes at her feet. “Put those on, Gria.”

“I’m not going. I’ve met this nice man and he wants me to stay here with him.”

Rolph moved two slow steps closer to Ryan’s chair. “You aren’t very smart, friend,” he said.

Ryan looked up at him and yawned. “Please go away and take the silly little girl with you, Rolph. You’re both tiresome.”

“I ought to drag you out of that chair and punch your mouth.”

“Go ahead!” Gria said eagerly. “Do it, Rolph.”

Ryan felt the first stirring of legitimate anger. He said, “Let me promise you something, Rolph. And listen carefully, because you’ll never hear it any straighter. I would like to have you start something. I would enjoy it. You wouldn’t enjoy any part of it. That, I promise.”

“Pretty boy,” Rolph said sullenly.

He stood and stared down at Ryan for the space of five waves breaking on the beach. Then he turned and took Gria’s wrist and pulled her out of the chair, picked up her shoes with his other hand. Halfway to the stone steps he turned and said, “I don’t want to find her down here again.”

“Then put a ring in her nose. I’m irresistible,” Ryan called.

“Good night, darling,” Gria called.

Later he tried to go to bed. It was no good. Something had made him restless. He thought of the shape of her mouth. He swam out, far and hard and fast. He thought of the process of learning to live again. Maybe a woman would hasten that process. The right woman. A wild, crazy kid like Gria. Odd name. Maybe some of the adolescent anguish would rub off on him.

After he had showered and toweled himself dry he found it easy to drop into the measureless chasm of sleep.

He lay on his back with the sun burning into him, his forearm across his eyes. Gulls dipped at the surf, croaking their complaints, their endless disappointments.

“Good morning, Ryan,” she said.

He sat up abruptly. Gria knelt beside him. She wore a pale green two-piece suit. She was taut and brown, yet modeled with the clean and perfect lines that sculptors seek for. In the sunlight her hair picked up odd bluish, greenish glints.

“Oh. You got the name from the desk.”

“Ryan Kestrick. I like the name. I’m Gria Baidee.”

He looked at her dark eyes. “You’re older than I thought.”

“I wouldn’t call that flattering. I’m twenty-four.”

“You acted about eighteen.”

“I suppose I did,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. He liked her better for it. “Rolph was furious. At himself, mostly, I think.”

“Because he backed down?”

“Yes. I told Sam about it and Sam laughed. You see, Rolph used to be a fighter. He keeps himself in good shape. He could have licked you, you know.”

“Did Rolph send you down here to build up his reputation?”

“Damn you, Ryan! You make me mad with everything you say.”

He lay back and covered his eyes. “Then go away.”

“I wish he had licked you.”

Ryan propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at her. “You are a nice kid. You live in a nice world where everybody fights with rules. I had one leg crossed over the other, with my ankle on my knee. If your ridiculous friend had taken one more step toward me I would have smashed his kneecap with my heel. They’d have had to carry him up those steps. I don’t play any games according to the rule book.”

The deep blush altered first her throat and then her face. “I was a little crazy last night.”

“Go play your games with people who know your rules.”

She laughed. It had a sound of heartbreak in it. It didn’t go with the sun, sand and sea. “Oh, Ryan. If I could tell you. If I could only tell you.”

“We now raise the curtain on scene three, act two. What do I have to do to convince you that I want to be left alone? You’re a very pretty and obviously healthy young girl with all the normal impulses of your position, background and education. Your experience has taught you that your combination of talents is irresistable to males of your own station. But, lambie, I don’t want any.

“I once knew a very homely young woman who was older, at fifteen, than you’ll ever be. She died at fifteen and she was worth uncounted dozens of you. I’m sorry to be blunt, but I’ve got to chase you away somehow. Whatever you are faced with, I know that I would find it more than dull. Now go away and try to grow up. It might become you.”

She jumped to her feet. Her face was contorted. “You... you pig!” she shouted. Scooping up a handful of sand, Gria flung it at him. She turned and walked down the beach. She walked with her head up, but with damp sand incongruously clinging to her. She walked with all the dignity of a spanked child. He blinked the last grains of sand out of his eyes. He laughed when she was out of earshot. The laugh wasn’t very satisfying.

It hadn’t been good to tell her of Paulette, because it made him remember Paulette. Poor little Paulette of the stringy blonde hair and the face like a dumpling. A century old at fifteen, with sadness that would never leave her colorless eyes.

At the border they found the packet on her. If someone hadn’t tipped them, it wouldn’t have been found. The group had heard later how she died, defiance in her eyes, the mouth tightly shut in the ruined face...

He waited and tried to feel something for the dead Paulette. But there was nothing. No warmth, no pity. Just a black, bitter-hard numbness.