Coils

Chapter 1

Clickaderick. Clickaderick.

Starboard, two degrees.

Click. Click.

… And through the half-built drowse-dream, words unlaunch a thousand ships, burn my topless towers, aluminum. Sweet, and fleeing… Fled now. What—

“You’re a strange man, Donald BelPatri,” they came. “Things have happened to you.”

I did not turn my head. I feigned sleep as I sorted my senses. The world had slipped away again, as it sometimes does. Or had I? Still here, now, though, us, as I’d left us, but moments before. Here: The roof of my houseboat, Hash Clash, puttering along, maybe a kilometer an hour, through the mangrove channel that winds southwest along the flank of Long Key, about halfway down from Miami toward Key West. Warm, cool, light, dark. Flick, flick…

We were running on the new autopilot, a Radio Shack model, which matched information from the recently installed government navigational beacons along the waterway against its programmed-in map, seasoning the mixture with a little radar as a charm against collisions. The channel here was quite narrow, with places where two houseboats would be pinched in passing—which also meant it was sufficiently shady to make extended periods of summertime exposure comfortable. More than that. Pleasurable. And that was all I really cared about. But—

I did not turn my head to Cora right away; I just grunted. I had to do that much at least, because I could tell from her tone that she knew I was awake.

But my response was far from adequate. She waited silently for something better.

“A truism,” I said at last. “Name three people to whom things have not happened. Name one.”

“Well-educated,” Cora mused now, as if she were dictating notes into a recorder. “Reasonably intelligent. Age about… what? Twenty-seven?”

“Give or take.”

“Size, large. Though not yet deformed by excessive intake of Italian food.” In the two weeks since we’d met, we’d developed a standing joke about our mutual fondness for pasta. It made a pretty way to keep the interrogation light. “Financial position—evidently secure. Ambitions…” Cora deliberately let it trail off.

“To have a good time,” I supplied, still not turning.

With my eyes closed, the puttering of the engine blended in my imagination with the chattering through the microcomputer of bytes of information. I didn’t really trust the damned thing yet. If I did I could have passed from drowsiness into a deep, dark sleep, with it in charge of things. Then this questioning would have been avoided. Well… postponed, I guess. Sooner or later, though, I knew that it would be upon me. Cora had been working up to it for several days now.

“Which,” she answered, “you have elevated to art-form status. Eyes blue. Hair dark and curly. Rugged features. A prejudiced person might even say‘handsome’. No visible…”

No, none quite visible. Under ordinary circumstances, that is. But that was why her voice had trailed off this time. The scars were well concealed under the famous dark and curly. She had discovered them about a week ago, one day when my head was in her lap, and had asked me about them. Suddenly, it seemed as if she had been nagging me continuously on the subject, and I wished to hell that she would stop.

I knew that if I told her bluntly to mind her own business, she would.

But, of course, I might never see her again after I did that. And I was discovering that I wanted very much to go on seeing her.

She seemed attracted to me on a deeper-than-summer-vacation level, and I…

I turned my head, resting it on folded forearms, looked at her. She was tall too, almost six feet, a long lithe body stretched out now on the beach towel spread on the houseboat roof. She’d taken off the top of her two-piece swimsuit, but the piece of fabric was in handy reach—in case of an emergency, such as perhaps a serious argument with me.

A basically cautious young lady, as might be expected of a schoolteacher. Basically lovely, too. Not a Hollywood face, by any means. Her dark hair was worn shorter than current fashion decreed, because, she said, it was easier to manage that way, and she had other things to do in life than take care of her hair… and the most basic thing about her, I was discovering, was that I didn’t want to lose her.

“No visible reason for existence?” I suggested at last. Lightly, of course.

Cora shifted her position to meet my eyes.

“Tell me about where you grew up,” she said. “From your speech I’d say it was somewhere in the Middle West.”

Less danger there, or so it seemed. Danger? Did I really mean that? Yes, I realized. For an awkward moment I felt as if I were caught in a forked stick and held up for scrutiny. It hurt more in some places than others. Like my scars. I had always considered myself a private person beyond a certain point, and…

I was vouchsafed a glimpse of myself struggling in the pincers. Something was wrong. It was as if there were certain things I wasn’t even allowing myself to ask. I saw, in my first moment’s self-scrutiny in years, that there was a strand of irrationality woven through my being. But that was all that I saw. No way to approach it, let alone untwine it.

The thought passed as quickly as it had come, and I was glad of it. The ground was safer here.

“Upper Michigan,” I answered. “A town so small that I’m sure you never heard of it. Called Baghdad, of all things.”

“As in ‘-on-the-subway?’ ”

“A long way from. Hiawatha National Forest isn’t far away. A million lakes and a billion mosquitoes… What can I say? I’d a pretty typical small-town existence.”

She smiled, for the first time in a long while.

“I envy that,” she said. “I’ve told you something about Cleveland. I suppose your father owned the local lumber mill or whatever?”

I shook my head.

“No. He just worked in it”

I didn’t feel much like talking about my parents, or even thinking about them, for that matter. They had been good people. Life in Baghdad had been idyllic. I’d led a sort of Huck Finn existence as a kid. Still, that was a long time ago, and I’d no desire to go back.

Another houseboat came into sight from around the bend and puttered toward us. My robot moved us a bit farther to starboard, providing ample leeway.

“I thought maybe you were living on some sort of inheritance.”

Perhaps it was the sun that started my head to aching. I sat up. I rubbed the back of my neck.

“We didn’t bring along any fishing gear, did we?” I said. “Damn! I was going to. Forgot.”

“All right, Don, I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

The other houseboat had cut its engines and was coasting past us on momentum. The heads of two young men had just appeared at the same window on our side. Topless girl sunbathers were not that uncommon anymore, but ones as attractive as Cora evidently were. One of the boys said something that I tried to tune out. Uncomfortably, I moved to block their view as Cora started putting on her top. My head was throbbing now.

“No! Now, Cora… Damn it! Don’t take it that way!”

“I’m not taking offense.”

“But you’re backing away from me. I can feel it”

“Backing? Or being pushed?”

“I…”

I stood up, but there was no place to go. The two leering youths were drifting on, and I looked after them almost hopelessly as they started their engines again.

I sat down, hanging my feet over the edge of the flat roof, my back to Cora. I drummed my heels on the fiberglass of the upper hull. The robot navigator mumbled its data in a madman’s silence.

“Don, it’s really none of my business where your money comes from. All I know is that you once told me that it amounted to eight thousand dollars a month being deposited in your bank account, and—”

“When did I tell you that?”

“A few nights ago. You may have been more asleep than awake,” she said. “It sounded likely, though. You seem to lead a pretty comfortable life.”

Beneath its carefully cultivated tan, I could feel my face turning red.

“You want to know where my money comes from?” I shouted. “Well, I don’t!”

Why should she be able to make me feel like a child confessing some secret sin? I felt a mad urge to turn and strike her across the face.

There was a pause. Then, “You don’t what?” she said, achieving a new note of puzzlement.

My throat was suddenly tight, my head splitting.

“I don’t want to think about it!” I got out at last, the words coming in a rush.

Then I turned back to her—and suddenly my hand, which had been threatening to strike her a moment earlier now shot out and seized her wrist. I was unable to say another word, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to let her go.

Her features took on a look of indignation which faded almost as rapidly as it occurred. As she stared at me, it was replaced by an expression of pity, concern.

“Don… Oh boy, you’ve got troubles—don’t you?”

“Yes.”

It was a relief to be able to say that much. Troubles? Yes, by then I knew I had troubles. I had no idea what they were. But troubles I had. I could see that. She’d helped to gain me that much of an insight

“You’re going to have to let my arm go,” she said, trying to recover lightness. Her bra, imperfectly fastened, was threatening to fall off. “Here comes another houseboat.”

I looked up. It was just rounding a gentle bend, eighty meters or so ahead. As I watched, my fingers relaxing until her wrist slipped free, a sun-reddened male face protruded on the pilot’s side.

“Looks like Willy Boy Matthews himself,” I said, surprising myself with what struck me as a humorous insight, coming totally out of left field.

I suddenly knew that some kind of internal crisis had just been passed, and I could feel myself half-choking with relief. I still had Cora with me. Whatever else, I felt that I wasn’t going to break off with her.

“Willy…? Whatever made you think of him?” Cora sounded anxious to keep talking to me, about anything at all, while her hands were busy with refastening.

“I don’t know. I guess the celebrities of yesteryear just pop up sometimes.”

The face in the passing boat, seen now at close range, didn’t really look much like that of the defunct revivalist preacher as I remembered him from screen and page. It was a gross, impressionistic resemblance more than anything else. When the mind really wants to be diverted, it seizes upon the handiest things.

“Now, do you want to tell me about your troubles?” she said. “I promise that nothing horrible will happen if you do.”

I am not sure that I believed that, but I wanted to. For reasons not clear to me, I felt desperate, on the verge of tears. And it seemed a shame to waste all that trauma. Just a little more effort, I told myself, and I could get it all said. She would know as much as I did. We would be closer, where we had just been on the verge of moving apart. How could anything horrible come of it, despite the irrational forebodings which had come to dance upon my decks?

“All right,” I said, looking out over the water to the places where it sparkled. “I don’t know where the money comes from.”

I paused a moment, hoping she’d say something. But she remained silent.

“So long as I don’t push matters,” I went on, “so long as I don’t try to find out, everything will be okay. I just know it. It comes in on an EFT—you know, an electronic funds transfer—with no identification as to its source. About a year ago I did go into the bank and ask them how hard it would be to trace it. They said there was no way they could run it down on the information they had. Then I got sick for a couple of days, and I haven’t thought about it since. But as long as I don’t wonder about the money, I’m all right. Everything’s fine.”

Those last two words rang in my head. I had recited them as if by rote. I couldn’t see how I had come to say them in light of the situation I had just described. Yet I had done more than that. For a long while I had believed them.

I raised my hand and rubbed my forehead, my eyes. The headache was still there. When I lowered my hand I realized that it was shaking.

Suddenly, Cora’s hands were on my shoulders.

“Take it easy, Don,” she said. “What I’d thought was that maybe you were getting some sort of disability payments. I mean, what with the head scars and all. But that’s certainly nothing to be… ashamed of.”

I realized that I was acting as if I were ashamed. I’d no idea why I should, though. Mostly now, I was afraid to think about it too much. I knew why now, too. There really was something—unusual—about the way I was set up in life. But far more unusual had been my attitude toward it—for how long? I was perspiring profusely now. There had to be something odd involved. Somehow, I knew that they weren’t disability payments. I didn’t know what the hell they were, and I didn’t want to know. I realized that I was afraid to find out. I was so damned scared that I would do almost anything to keep from knowing. Yet—

Cora slipped down into a sitting position beside me, extending her legs, long and tanned, feet dangling. We both regarded the rippling waterway, alternately dark and shiny as we slid from shade to light, more Rorschach than magic mirror, I suppose, for she saw nothing of my fears.

“I don’t suppose it’s anything actually sinister,” she mused softly. Then, after a time, she added, “But you said that your family isn’t wealthy?”

I nodded, only half-hearing, now that some crisis had passed. She had scored a sort of victory and we both knew it, though neither of us could say what, and I was only beginning to see how. For me, she sang beyond the genius of the sea. I knew that I could never go back to being exactly the same person I had been only a little while ago. I shuddered, and then I took hold of her hand. We continued to watch the water, and the pain in my head subsided.

There was a moment of crystal clarity, and then I could almost see the pine and the spruce towering around us instead of the mangrove. I could smell and hear the forest instead of the salt splashing ocean fluttering its empty sleeves.

For the first time in a long while—years, I suppose—I wanted to go back home.

“Cora?”

“Yes?”

“Fly home with me and meet the family?”

Oh! Blessed rage for order…