Michelangelo_s Notebook

30

Carl Kressman eased weary old bones out of bed at his normal early hour, then went up into the tower of his Florida-style beach house to take a look at the day. As usual, the weather was nearly perfect: cloudless sky, limitless azure Gulf, gentle breeze and a temperature that was somewhere in the eighties already.

Kressman went down to his bedroom again, slipped into his bathing suit and gave himself a quick once-over in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door. At seventy-five he still had most of what he’d had at twenty, except now some of it was chemically or mechanically enhanced. Viagra and a couple of other potions kept his pecker up when it was necessary-which wasn’t all that often, if truth be told-and a pacemaker that looked like a pack of cigarettes stuck under the skin of his chest kept his ticker tocking. For some reason, unlike most of his friends, he still had all his hair-white, now, of course-and trifocal contact lenses kept his vision twenty-twenty. He was tanned, fit and in good spirits, completely in command of his senses and rich as Croesus. What else could a man want?

The tanned old man took the circular staircase down to the main floor, went to the all-white kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic machine. Standing by the sink and looking out at the big swimming pool at the back of his lot he shook his head, savoring the rich flavor of the brew. Life was certainly a strange thing; there was a time when he had counted his life in minutes. The thought of living out the last of his long life in a place like this, with beach houses, swimming pools and machines that made coffee for you before you woke was almost too much to comprehend. He had come through wars, hurricanes and untold other disasters and had more than just survived-he had prospered. He laughed out loud at that. At twenty years old he had barely heard of shrimp let alone tasted one, and in the end the wonderful little morsels had made him rich.

Kressman finished his coffee, rinsed out his mug at the sink, then put it in the rack to dry. He crossed the tile-floored living room, went out through the screen door onto the covered porch and then down the steps to the pool. More than one person had made fun of him for having a pool when his house was only fifty feet from the Gulf of Mexico but he enjoyed the convenience. The pool was filled with saltwater pumped in from the Gulf, filtered and heated to eighty degrees, night or day. There was no surf to get in the way of his exercise and no currents or riptides to deal with.

He walked down the concrete apron around the pool, slipped out of his slippers at the foot of the diving board and picked up his goggles out of the little plastic basket he kept there. He went out to the end of the board, bounced twice, lightly, then arced into the air, slicing into the breeze-rippled water with the near professional ease of long practice.

Kressman began his regular laps, his mind clearing as he went through his routine of alternating crawl and breast stroke. As he swam he let his mind go free, memory skittering over his life, his happy years with his wife-dead now after a short, painful battle with cancer-his two children, boy and girl, one a doctor now, the other a professor in New York. He thought of his businesses, taking half a dozen old shrimpers from Fernandina Beach, refurbishing them and putting them to work, half a dozen becoming a hundred, a hundred becoming a freezing and packaging depot, the depot station becoming one of the biggest seafood companies in the south. Investing in Alabama coast real estate and getting even richer.

All so he could wind up swimming in his pool in the early morning, all by himself with his memories. He reached the end of his routine, did one more lap just for the hell of it, then floated on his back for a minute or two, staring up into the young morning sky, thinking about having a big breakfast down the road at the new and improved Nolan’s, recovered from the hurricane now, and back in business better than ever. Steak, eggs and pan fries and to hell with his cholesterol for once. “Liegt der Bauer unterm Tisch, war das Essen nimmer frisch!” as his papa used to tell him.

He flipped over onto his front, treaded water for a moment and then paddled forward until his feet touched the slightly grainy gunite of the shallow end. He stepped forward, pushing through the water with a side-to-side sweeping motion of his arms, barely feeling the first spike of glass as it sliced through his foot. By the third step he was aware that something was wrong; like a lot of men his age, Kressman had type 2 diabetes and had lost a great deal of sensation in his feet, but by now the pain had gone farther up his legs. He looked down and saw that the water around him was turning pink.

Another step and one of the deadly, invisible weapons sliced through his right Achilles tendon. He staggered, then fell, his arms outstretched. One of his hands was punctured and another piece slashed into his left calf. Kressman, already going into shock, knew that he was in terrible trouble. As well as diabetes, Kressman also suffered from a number of minor heart ailments, all of them requiring the administration of blood thinners. One of them was Coumadin-also known as Warfarin, a powerful rat poison. Multiple cuts like he’d just received and in warm water could easily result in his exsanguinating-bleeding out in a matter of minutes.

He crawled forward, trying to reach the safety of the steps leading out of the pool. His other hand was cut, his index finger almost amputated. He gave a gurgling scream and fell to one side, and he was pierced twice more, once just below his ribs on the right, cutting through his thin flesh into his liver, the second piece of glass goring him in the thigh, opening up the femoral artery close to his groin.

He screamed again, his mouth half underwater and he began to choke. He tried to roll over and failed, his torn hands flailing, trying to find purchase on the bottom of the pool only to meet with more agony. As the ripped artery in his leg poured out his lifeblood the water around him turned from pink to red. His eyes rolled back in his head and he slowly rolled over, his face fully underwater. A moment later he died, the battery in the pacemaker still jolting his heart with electricity every few seconds and getting no response, the organ still jerking spasmodically in the dead man’s chest.