The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

Chapter Eight

There was a hornet big as a sea gull perched on something right in front of his face. It had a wide nasty little face, gray-green eyes, long heavy milky hair, a puffy mouth heavily lipsticked. It smacked its evil little mouth and swung its stinger back and forth. It had big veined wings which looked as rigid as plate glass. At intervals the wings would vibrate for several seconds, becoming almost invisible, making a harsh resonant burring sound.

The hornet was gone. A phone was ringing. He sat up, lost in space and time, still half wary of the hornet. He was in a huge vague bed in a shadowy room, with a dawn slant of sun coming in from the breakfast porch. As an orderly part of his mind picked up the count on the ringing of the phone, he turned and saw a tousle of curls sunk into a pillow at the far edge of the bed, four feet away, and a brown nape of tender neck, a silky V of white hair against it, and a deep brown shoulder, and a pale blue sheet, draped, molding the long girl-shape of the rest of her — incredible ornamentation to an unknown morning. Memory was suddenly an avalanche, pouring into the dry arroyo of the stunned and empty mind. He felt a stab of delight so unexpected it was more like pain than joy. He felt as if somebody had suddenly thrust a hollow needle into his heart and pumped it full of spiced molasses.

... thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and the phone went on and on. By the simplest deduction, it had to be Betsy Alden. Anybody else would have given up. By letting it ring and ring, she was letting him know who it was.

... nineteen, twenty, twenty-one...

He found the phone on the shelf to the left of the headboard.

“Yes?”

“Good morning, Kirby,” Joseph said, the rich voice almost gelatinous in its baritone flexibility. “Uh — how—”

“You’ve really been very tiresome lately, Kirby. But all will be forgiven if you can give us a little co-operation now. You are really in all kinds of trouble now, you know. The vicious assault on that poor waiter was a stupid mistake. But you seem to be reasonably ingenious, so we think you can probably devise some way of getting from that apartment to the Glorianna without incident. Listen carefully, my boy. She is tied up at the Biscayne Marina, E Dock. Please be aboard by ten at the latest.”

“What time is it?”

“Twenty after seven. It should give you ample time.”

“But I don’t—”

“Filiatr — Betsy, rather, is a very silly, stubborn, emotional child. She tried to be clever. Let’s just say it isn’t wise to attempt a fool’s mate against the queen’s gambit. Perhaps she was counting upon a sentimentality which doesn’t really exist. Or trying to play us against you. It’s rather hard to tell at the moment. She’s no longer very coherent. I must congratulate you upon not confiding in her completely. Because she really became very eager to confide in us. We did learn you two young people have become quite fond of each other in a very short time. And, of course, where to get in touch with you. And with Miss Farnham. Charla is wonderfully eager to talk with Miss Farnham too, and they should be bringing her here any moment. But we won’t start asking her tiresome questions until, say, ten o’clock.”

“What are you trying to—”

“I’m urging you to join us, old boy. I’m counting on your sense of responsibility for Betsy. And your sentimentality, I suppose. She’s really too high strung for this sort of treatment, you know. Also, unless you’ve suddenly become irrational, you must realize that with the way things have developed, you need us quite badly. We’ll be expecting you, Kirby.”

The line was dead. He hung up and looked at his hand and noted that his fingers were trembling. He got up and put on his shorts and went around to the other side of the bed. He sat on his heels and looked at Bonny Lee’s dear sleeping face and thought his heart would burst with the wonder of it. It was dark against the pillow, lips parted, a face of absolute innocence. Her hand rested near her face. It was a lean, tanned, muscular hand, very like the hand of an active boy in his early teens. In the reflected glow of the early sunlight he saw the white hairline outline of a scar on the back of her hand shaped like an L. He wondered where she had gotten it.

He put his hand on the warmth of the bare shoulder and shook her gently. “Bonny Lee, darling. Hey! Bonny Lee!” Aside from a faint frown that disappeared immediately, there was no response.

He shook her more violently, spoke more forcefully.

“Wurrow!” she said, a small, irritable squalling sound, and flounced over onto her other side. He rolled her back over and shook her.

Finally she opened her eyes and slowly focused on him. She glowered at him. “Middla ni’,” she mumbled. “Middla ni’. Lemmilone.” And she was gone again. He pulled the sheet off her, pulled her legs out of bed, took her by the shoulders and sat her up. She sat with her chin on her chest, shoulders slumped, mumbling and growling at him. When he took his hands from her shoulders, she toppled onto her side and gave a small, purring snore. He sat her up again, took her wrists and started to pull her into a standing position. When he realized he would merely be pulling her off the bed onto her face, he reached and took her around the waist and stood her on her feet about two feet from the bed. She started to sag, then braced her legs. She peered at him, her eyes slightly crossed. As soon as he let go of her, she made a slow half-turn, took one step and dived face down across the bed. He stood her on her feet again and began to walk her. She leaned heavily against him, staggering, cussing him, groaning. He released her suddenly, ready to catch her if she fell. She wobbled around, caught her balance, shuddered violently, combed her fingers back through her curls and focused on him.

“So what the hell you doing, Kirk? Gawd!”

“Please wake up, Bonny Lee.”

She squinted toward the porch. “Dawn!” she said despairingly. “Sonuvabitch!”

“I would have let you sleep, but I need your help.”

She looked at him with venomous suspicion. “I tell you, sugar, it better be important.”

“It is.”

She shuddered again. She turned and blundered toward the bathroom. He heard the shower begin. He went over and examined her clothing. Lime slacks, a white blouse with a yellow figure, a little yellow jacket, white sandals, two blue-green wisps of nylon. He put her clothing on a chair just outside the bathroom door. The shower stopped. The door opened wide enough for her wet brown arm. “Fetch m’purse, sugar!” she called. He put it into her hand. He checked Bernie’s wardrobe, laid out a gray sports shirt and dark blue slacks.

In a little while she stuck her head out, started to say something, saw her clothing, smiled at him and took her clothes into the bathroom. The protocol was slightly confusing. Apparently one could move about as unselfconsciously naked as a tenpin until morning ablutions began, at which time modesty set in.

She came striding out, brushed and lipsticked, giving a little hitch at the waistband of the lime slacks, tossing her jacket and purse on a chair, smiling at him. “Once you’re up I guess it isn’t too terrible. I been told I’m a little hard to wake up.”

“You bounced out of bed the first time I whispered your name.”

“You’re next in there. I’ll neaten up some. What you staring at?”

He realized his expression was probably rather strange. Looking at her, he had been reminded of something a teammate had said about Mickey Mantle. “The more he takes off, the bigger he looks.”

Clothes changed Bonny Lee. She looked taller and thinner. It did not seem plausible that all of that well-remembered abundance of breast and hip, all the fecundities, the armsful and handsful of sweet sighing weight could have disappeared into such a compacted trimness, into the tailored litheness of a clothed and pretty stranger.

Her smile disappeared and her brown eyes widened. “Oh, Gawd, you never seen me in clothes afore!” She blushed violently, deepening her tan to redness and making her face look moist. “I wanna fall right smack through the floor, sugar.”

“It’s all right. We understand how it happened.”

“Sure enough, but I’m thinking on how it would sound to somebody. Shees marie, how the hell would you explain it?”

“We don’t have to try.”

“You rushing me out of here on account of somebody coming?”

“No.”

“Just who is this friend of Bernie’s that’s a friend of yours?”

“She’s an actress.”

“Oh, great!”

“Uh — Bernie’s in love with her, I think.”

“Anything in a skirt, Bernie’s in love with it. Take your shower.”

When he came back out in the gray shirt — too snug across the shoulders — and the blue slacks — too high above the shoes — rubbing a jaw made raw by the only razor blade he could find, he smelled coffee. She’d made the bed. She moved slowly toward him, her jaw belligerent, her fists on her hips, her brown eyes narrowed. The waiter’s colorful uniform was behind her, on the foot of the bed.

“You wearin’ Bernie’s stuff, Kirk. You maybe been a waiter at the Elise? Just what the hell is going on?”

“Bonny Lee, I just can’t explain right now—”

“Right now is when you do, mister, or it’s going to be like you was wrapped in bob wire and spun like a top toy.”

He made two forlorn beginnings, then said, “My name is really Kirby Winter.”

She tilted her head. “You say it like it meant something.”

“I thought it might.”

“Kirby Winter? Sounds like I know of you somehow. You talk nice. School educated. Some kind of actor?”

“I’m — sort of in the news. Starting yesterday.”

“I don’t pay much attention to—” She stopped abruptly and put her hand to her throat. She peered at him, shocked and incredulous. “Sugar, you him! Twenny-seven million bucks! You the one stole and hid all that money!”

“I didn’t steal it. I haven’t got it.”

She shook her head wonderingly. “You kin to that Kroops.”

“Krepps. Uncle Omar.”

She moved back to the bed and sat down limply and stared up at him. “You and some little old school-teacher-lookin’ gal tooken it, and like the whole world looking for you all over hell and gone, and you cozied up in bed here with Bonny Lee Beaumont, herself.”

“I didn’t take a dime.”

She studied him for a few moments. “Kirk, sugar. I mean Kirby. I surely know you didn’t. I know the rough kind and I know the sly kind, and once in ever’ long while, the sweet kind, which you are and which there’s not enough of, and I wouldn’t say you tooken it at all, so why don’t you go turn yourself in and say how it came about?”

“I can’t. There’s so many reasons, there isn’t time to tell you, but I just can’t. I just hope — you’ll be willing to help me, even though you know who I am.”

“Even though? Don’t you make me cross now, sugar. On this here big crazy old bed you learned me who you are, and what you want of me, I will do. But let’s put a cigarette and coffee with it,” she said and got up.

They took the coffee out onto the breakfast porch. There was a sun-glare on the bay. “You said you’ve got a little car?”

“Down in the alley. A little old yalla Sunbeam thing.”

“Do you know where the Biscayne Marina is?”

“Sure thing. I knew a boy kept his boat there one time.”

“I’d like you to drive me there, Bonny Lee.”

“Then what?”

“Just leave me off there.”

“That’s all? Not much favor to that, Kirby.”

“A lot of people know my face. A lot of people are looking. It could turn into a mess.”

“You running away by boat?”

“I... I expect so.”

“Can’t put the top up on the car on account it doesn’t have a top any more. You could kind of scrunch down, I expect. Let me see what I can find.” She went into the apartment. He heard her opening and closing drawers. Music began to play. She came back out with a wide-brimmed planter’s hat and a pair of dark sunglasses. “Should be news any time now. Here, you try these.”

The hat was a little small, but he could pull it down far enough.

She nodded. “You look like anybody and ever’body. Camera a-hangin’ round your neck, you’d be invisible any place in Florida entire. No need of scrunching.”

“Aren’t you going to ask if taking me there is going to implicate you in anything?”

“Implicate? That mean messed up in? I love a somebody, Kirby, I do like he asks me.”

He took the glasses and hat off and stared at her. “Love?”

“You weren’t listening in the bed, sugar?”

“Well, yes, I was, but I thought it — was sort of a manner of speaking.”

“Hell yes it was, and I’m speaking it again. You got something against it?”

“No. I just mean that — well, I mean you seem to accept the fact I’ll go off in a boat — and you don’t know if we’ll see each other again, and you don’t seem to — well, to really care very much — and I thought—”

“You know, you could be, like they say, over-educated.”

She wiped her lipstick onto the paper napkin, came smiling around the table and bent over him, put her hand on the nape of his neck and began to kiss him with considerable skill and energy. He groped for her and turned her and brought her into his lap. Within minutes they were trembling and gasping and giddy. She pushed his hands away from her and sat bolt upright, her hands on his shoulders, head tilted, smiling. Her eyes looked drowsy.

“I love you good, Kirby. And love is a pretty thing. See how fast all worked up we gettin’? That’s the good of it, sugar. Going to bed is happy and it’s fun. It’s the way you get the good of it with none of the bad. It’s like everybody has forgot that’s all it is and all it was ever meant to be. People got to mess it up, it seems. Cryin’, moanin’, clingin’ onto one another, all jealous and selfish and hateful. We love each other on account of we give each other a lot of happy fun, and if it comes round again, we’ll take some more, and if it doesn’t, we got this much already anyhow. But no vows and pledges and crap like that, hear? That’s what people do because they got the funny idea it’s the right thing to do. And before they know it, the fun part is gone, gotten itself strangled on the fine print, like it was a deed to some land. I live free and simple, Kirby, and I look on myself in the mirror and say hello to a friend I like. The day I stop liking her, I change my ways. So this is who loves you, and that’s what the word means, and I got friends would die for me and me for them. What I say, you run onto a hell of a girl.”

“I did,” he said. “I did indeed.”

“Any man using me,” she said intently, “he gets a kick turns him soprano. I’m eager, but I’m no gawddamn free lunch counter for any bassar prowling for kicks, hear?”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t ever get to be. Hey! That’s the news starting.”

They went inside and sat on a couch. After the national news, Kirby was the first item on the local news.

“State, Federal and local authorities have joined in the hunt for mystery man Kirby Winter and his accomplice, Wilma Farnham. Last night Arturo Vara, room service waiter at a Miami Beach hotel, swore out an assault warrant against Winter. As the police reconstruct it, Winter, hemmed in by reporters in the corridor outside his hotel room yesterday, broke into an adjoining room, placed a call for room service, then, when Vara arrived, slugged him, donned his uniform and made his way through the reporters to the elevators and escaped from the hotel. He has not yet been apprehended.”

Bonny Lee turned and stared at Kirby and raised one eyebrow in question. He nodded, guiltily.

“Dr. Roger Farnham, Associate Professor at Florida Eastern, elder brother of Wilma Farnham, disclosed that after a brief unfruitful interview with the press yesterday, Miss Farnham left the apartment where she lived alone, taking a few personal possessions, and has not been seen since. Police have established that Miss Farnham and Winter held clandestine meetings at a Miami hotel during his infrequent returns to this area from various foreign countries.

“The question which is on everyone’s lips is what could have happened to the missing twenty-seven million dollars turned over to O.K. Devices by Krepps Enterprises at the direct order of Omar Krepps, international financier, who died suddenly last week. It is believed that Winter and the Farnham woman carefully planned the huge embezzlement over a period of time, including the destruction of the files and records and, according to police theory, including plans to leave the country, plans they may have consummated last night.

“In addition to the assault charge, Winter and the Farnham woman face embezzlement charges lodged by Krepps Enterprises. At midnight last night K.E. posted a reward of ten thousand dollars for any information leading to the apprehension of either or both of the fugitives. They are also bringing civil suit against both Winter and the Farnham woman. Both the tax and immigration authorities are anxious to serve summonses on both Winter and the woman.

“Winter is described as being six feet, one-half inch tall, weight about one-ninety, sandy hair, dark blue eyes, age thirty-two, small crescent scar on left cheekbone, clean-shaven, polite, soft-spoken, highly intelligent, disarming.”

Bonny Lee went over and turned off the radio. She came back to him, shaking her head. “You now a celebrity, man.” She touched his cheek. “Where’d you get the scar?”

“A little girl hit me with a rock when I was about six years old.” He grasped her hand, touched the scar he had seen. “How about this one?”

“I swang back-handed at a little old buck-tooth boy pinched me when I was about eleven.”

“You need ten thousand dollars?”

“Hope to God I never do need it so bad, sugar. Can you think of anything at all they don’t want you for?”

“Armed robbery.”

“Keep trying. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Sugar, I better get you onto that boat before anybody tracks you right to here.”

“Or before I get too scared to walk out the door.”

He put on the hat and the glasses and checked his pockets. He went and got the gold watch off the shelf near the phone. Thanks for everything, Uncle Omar, he thought.

“How far to that Marina?”

“Ten minutes, about.”

Before they went out, he kissed her. They held each other tightly for a few moments. She looked up at him. “Fun?”

“More than I can say.”

“I could get a little weepy over you, Kirby. Let’s go.”

The Sunbeam roadster was, he guessed, about three years old, dinged, dirty and beginning to rust out. But the engine roared immediately, and she yanked it around a corner like a toy on the end of a string. He clapped his hat back on just in time. It was almost nine o’clock. She drove with her brown hands high on the wheel, chin up, eyes slitted, cigarette in the corner of her mouth. She shifted up and shifted down, and danced in and out of the lines of morning traffic with what at first seemed like terrifying abandon, but he soon recognized as such skill that he felt entirely safe in the noisy little yellow car.

She cut through to the waterfront, turned north and went three blocks, and when she began to downshift he saw the big Marina sign and all the pleasure craft at the wide docks. Suddenly she gunned it and went on by, and he saw the prowl cars at the curb and saw the uniformed men on the dock. She turned the next corner, braked, and tucked the little car into a parking slot.

“That door there is shut and locked,” she said.

“I don’t know what the hell to do!”

“Just sit tight and let Bonny Lee find out for sure. What’s the boat?”

“The Glorianna.”

She found a newspaper under the seat and handed it to him. “Hide behind this, sugar. Be right on back.”

She was gone for a full fifteen unbearable minutes. Then she piled into the car and drove away away from there. She headed west, found a shopping center, parked amid the other cars.

“It took me a time, Kirby, to single me out a cute cop and get him a-coming over to me to show off how big he is. That Glorianna, she took off twenty minutes ago and those cops got there ten minutes too late. Now as near as I can tell, what happened is they found out a lot of your stuff was moved out of some cruddy hotel, and it took time to track it down, and they found it got took to that Marina and put aboard the Glorianna. So they figure you’re on it and they got you nailed good, because they got the Coast Guard looking already and they’ll pick it up any time. It’s a big old son of a gun the man there said. You know, they got the idea that twenty-seven million got put aboard, and they’re all standing around so sweaty they can’t hardly stand it. It wouldn’t hurt me a bit to know what did get moved onto it, sugar.”

“Personal junk. Total cash value, maybe two hundred tops. There’s even a pair of ice skates.”

Her eyes looked startled. “Shees marie. Ice skates!”

“I’ve got no place to turn, Bonny Lee.”

“I should truly like to hear from the beginning. Should we go back to Bernie’s?”

“I’d rather not go back there.”

“All we need is a place to talk, for now. And the last place they’d look I’d say is a public beach. Okay?”

“Okay, Bonny Lee.”

The noise of the little car eliminated any chance of conversation. She drove over to the beach and headed north. By ten o’clock they were on a cement bench in a small open pavilion, looking out across a wide beach toward the curl and thud of the blue Atlantic waves. Though it was a Tuesday morning in April, there were hundreds of people on the beach. He was beginning to feel depressed and helpless.

“You load it all onto me, sugar, and then you get a new opinion.”

He told her. He droned a leaden parade of facts, without color or hope. And in the telling of them, he disheartened himself even more. He took it from the first legal conference after the funeral right up to the morning phone call from Joseph.

He stared woodenly at her. “Think I should go try to explain?”

“Who the hell would believe you? Gawddammit, Kirby, they’d start looking for the needle marks in your arm.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I’m this girl loves you. Remember? I do. But it is sure God an effort. Not loving you. That’s right easy. Believing all this stuff comes hard. Charla. What the hell kind of name is that? Sugar, after those three broads, you sure got a change when I hopped into bed.”

“What should I do?”

“You ever get a cake with a hacksaw in it?”

“I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

“If both them girls were on that boat, the Coast Guard got them by now for sure. And that Charla and Joseph are maybe jammed up as bad as you.”

“I doubt it.”

He took Uncle Omar’s gold watch out of his pocket. He fiddled with it, absently. He wound it, pulled the stem out, set it to correspond with his wrist watch. It had an hour hand, a minute hand and a sweep second hand. It had a fourth hand motionless at twelve o’clock, silver instead of the gold of the other hands. He wondered what it was for. He pushed the stem in again, and suddenly discovered that by pushing it in and turning it, he could turn the silver hand back to a new position.

In the instant he did so, the world turned silent and his vision clouded. His first thought was that he was having a heart attack. There was such an utter silence he could hear the murmurous sound of his own blood in his ears. Any speculation as to what might have happened was drowned in a total, primitive, unreasoned terror. To known hazards, the human animal can react with fear bleached with reason. The unknown drops him back into the cave nights, into the sabered terror, awash in adrenaline, the sphincter precarious, muscles knotted for the sideways leap, the head-down whimpering run.

He sprang to his feet, gasping, trembling, and yanked the sunglasses from his eyes. He felt a strange resistance as he jumped up, as though a wind he had not felt or heard pressed against him. All the world was still. With the sunglasses off, the world was a pale, unpleasant red. He had seen the world look like that before, when he had looked through the prism of a single lense reflex camera with a red filter on the taking lense. But through the camera he had seen the normal unending movement of the world. Now he was in a pink desert, or a garden of savage sculpture, or inside a painting by Dali filled with the horror of a timeless motionlessness.

A single wave, the length of the beach, curled and did not fall. The gulls of pink stone hung from invisible wires. He turned and looked down at the girl. The color of her face was unpleasant, and her lips looked black. She was caught in that eternity, hand half-raised in gesture, lips parted, tongue touching the edge of her front teeth. She had the merciless stillness of a body in a casket.

He closed his eyes tightly, opened them again. Nothing had changed. He looked at the gold watch. The gold hand that marked the seconds was motionless. He looked at his wrist watch. It, too, had stopped. He looked at the gold watch carefully, looked at the silver hand and at last was able to detect the tiny movement of it as it crept up toward twelve. He held the watch to his ear and thought he could hear a tiny sound, a faint, sustained musical note. He had set the silver hand back to ten. It was at seven minutes to twelve. It seemed a fair assumption he had been in the red world of silence for three minutes.

He took two experimental strides. Again he felt the odd resistance against his body. And his shoes felt as if they weighed twenty pounds each. It was difficult to lift them, to move them forward through the air and then to push them back down again. They had a strange weight and inertia, as though he walked through glue. And the pressure against his body seemed caused by an equivalent inertia in his clothing. He bent down and picked up a discarded paper cup. It was like lifting a cup made of lead. He felt the weight and resistance of it when lifting it, but when movement stopped, it seemed weightless. All the normal muscle-to-brain signals were distorted. Cautiously he released the cup. It remained suspended in the air, exactly where he had released it. He reached out and pushed it. He could move it through the air, but its motion stopped the instant he stopped exerting pressure against it. In this red world a body in motion did not tend to stay in motion. He grasped the cup and squeezed it. He could crumple it, but it was like crumpling a cup made of heavy lead foil rather than thin cardboard.

He looked at the watch again. Three minutes to twelve. He looked down the beach at the hundreds of motionless people. He looked toward the drive and saw the frozen river of traffic. Far over the city a jet was pasted against the sky. Fifty feet away was a small boy halted in the act of running, horridly balanced on the ball of one bare foot.

Cautiously he pressed the stem of the watch in, thinking he might turn the silver hand back to twelve, trying to believe that if he did so the world would be the same again, knowing he could not endure another three minutes of the red silence.

When he pushed the stem in, the silver hand, like the hand of a stop watch, snapped back to twelve. The noise of the world crashed in around him and the redness was gone instantaneously. The wave struck, the cup fell, the boy ran, the flying things flew.

“Think you could—” Bonny Lee said and stopped, stared at him, stared at the bench, looked at him again, swallowed, and said, “You can sure God move fast, sugar! Wow! You’re in better shape than I thought.”

He looked at her and laughed. He laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks, and until he began to hear an edge of hysteria in his own voice. She tried to laugh with him and then stopped, staring at him with concern.

“Kirby! Kirby, dammit!”

“I’m in great shape,” he said, gasping. “I’ve never been in better shape!”

“You losing your damn mind, sugar?”

He dialed the gold watch back to the red world. He wanted time to think, time to control the helpless laughter. But laughter was easy to control. It sounded too hollow, too ghastly in the silence. She was again frozen, this time looking directly into his eyes.

He shuddered, shaking himself like a wet dog. He looked at the watch. He had set the silver hand at quarter of twelve. Fifteen minutes, if he wanted all of it. Or just depress the stem and let the world snap back to life. No. That was a distorted version of reality, an invitation to insanity. The world was the same. It was continuing. He had merely stepped out of it. Everything had stopped but the vibrations of light itself. And the dingy red look of the world might mean that light itself had slowed in relation to him. More logically, he had changed his objective relationship to time, so that perhaps one hour of red time would be a fractional part of a second of real time. Of course, that could lead you into conjecture as to which one was “real” time, a philosophical route to the same goal — insanity.

Using that premise, he considered the phenomenon of the paper cup. The feeling of weight would, in that event, be the product of its natural inertia multiplied by the extraordinary speed, the “real” world speed with which he had lifted it. And when he had released it, it had dropped back to the speed of the real world, which in the red world was an objective motionlessness. When he had crumpled it, he had stopped the invisible upward motion. It had begun to fall, imperceptibly, and when the world had returned to normal he had seen, out of the corner of his eye, the rest of the fall.

Suddenly he knew why Uncle Omar had been so extraordinarily deft at amateur magic. And he knew what had happened at Reno. He could see the plump, nervous little highschool teacher with the shabby clothing, with the tense smile, watching the dice coming to rest on the green table and, at the very instant they stopped, moving into the red world, circling the table, reaching through the silence to turn one die to the proper winning number, returning to his place, and instantaneously catapulting himself back into the “real” world.

And he could guess where all the rest of the money had come from, and why so much had been given away. And he knew he had received his inheritance. It was as if he had been looking through a kaleidoscope, turning it aimlessly, looking at the meaningless patterns of the fragments, then had by accident turned it just so and had the bright bits form a realistic image. He marveled at the control, the caution, the lifelong guile of Omar Krepps.

He reached out and touched the girl’s cheek with his fingertips. Her cheek felt neither warm nor cool. It seemed to have no discernable temperature. And it felt unhumanly firm, as though fashioned of some dense but very slightly resilient plastic. He touched the pale curls and they had the texture of iron wire. When he bent them, they stayed in that position.

Again he found himself in danger of making the subjective error of assuming the world had changed. He found himself glad he had been forced, by Uncle Omar, to take the courses in Logic. Bonny Lee was in “real” time. Through her eyes he was merely movement far too fast to leave any retinal image, his touch on cheek and hair, too brief to leave any sensory impression.

He suddenly perceived one of the rules Uncle Omar must have followed all his life. You must return to the real world in the exact space where you left it. Otherwise you can drive men mad. In spite of all the caution of Omar Krepps, he had been considered most odd and most eccentric by the rest of the world. Perhaps there had been some carelessness from time to time. Now he knew the reason why Charla and Joseph thought of him with an almost superstitious awe. In international financial intrigue, the gold watch would give Uncle Omar the insuperable advantage of a one-eyed man in a world of the blind.

This was the edge! This was what they wanted, yet could not specifically describe. It made him feel cold to think of this device in the hands of Charla.

Ten minutes more. He resolved he would let the time run out and see if, when the silver hand reached twelve, the result would be the same. He started to walk, but the inertia of the shoes made it a slow and difficult effort. He took them off. When he dropped one, it remained in the air. He started to push it down to the sand, then realized it made no difference to leave it there. He could walk more easily, but he had to press against the inertia of his clothing, and knew that if he was naked he could walk freely. His feet did not sink into the sand as far as he would normally expect, but he did leave curiously perfect shallow footprints. He wondered about it and realized that the soft sand had begun to fall back into the prints but, in the red world, the motion was too slow to be visible. He walked by the eeriness of the red statues, all the way to the water’s edge. He stepped into the water. It offered resistance, but his foot sank into it. It was like stepping into firm jello. When he pulled his foot out, the impression, inches deep, remained. Drops of sea water hung in the air, perfect spheres, pink in the red light of the world. One was as high as his face and, on impulse, he leaned and took it into his mouth. It was like a firm little blob of gelatine. He chewed down on it and swallowed it. It left a salty taste in his mouth.

Five minutes.

He walked back through the people. He made himself stop and look into their faces. He came upon a little girl feeding gulls. The hurled morsel of stale bread was a few inches from her fingertips. The gulls were poised. A yard from the back of the little girl’s head there was an object frozen in the silent air. It was a toy sand shovel. He looked and saw a fat boy several years older than the girl, his face bloated with hate and rage, ten feet behind the little girl, frozen in somewhat the attitude of a big league pitcher when the ball is halfway to the plate.

Kirby reached out and put his hand against the tin shovel and pushed. He moved it several feet to the side. The fat boy wore swim trunks and a baggy T shirt. Kirby walked in front of the little girl and reached up and put his hand around the body of one of the gulls and pulled gently. He pulled it down and walked it over to the fat boy. He pulled the boy’s T shirt away from his bare stomach. It was like bending metallic mesh. He pushed the gull up under the T shirt and bent the bottom edge of the shirt back in.

Two minutes.

He hurried up the beach to the pavilion. He put his shoes on and positioned himself as before, and discovered he had time to spare. On playful impulse he took a cigarette out and placed it carefully between her parted lips. The silver hand moved closer and closer....

The bright morning was like a light turned on.

She gave a great leap of surprise and took the cigarette out of her mouth. “What the hell!”

“A trick my uncle taught me,” he said. He turned and looked down the slope of the beach. Gulls dipped. A bright shovel had spun harmlessly into the sand. A fat boy had gone mad, howling, leaping, whirling, until a gull, crying alarm, darted up, leaving some white feathers floating down. The perfection of his footprints was gone, and the footprint in the water.

Bonny Lee’s face looked strained. “Tricks are fun, but I din like that one worth a damn, Kirby. Make me all cold and queasy.”

He sat on the cement bench beside her. “I’m sorry.”

“Honess, Kirby, first you act like the end of the world is here, then you’re laughing like a nut, then you do some spooky trick. I thought I had you figured, but now I—”

“Something important — suddenly happened, Bonny Lee.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I want to do — a sort of experiment. Look right at this spot here on the bench between us. Look at it very carefully. Then tell me what happens and tell me how you feel about what happens.”

“You know, I’m getting terrible nervous about you, sugar.”

“Please, Bonny Lee.”

He twisted himself back into the red world, this time turning the silver hand further than before. He turned it all the way around to twelve again and there it stopped and would not go further. This, then, was the limit of the red world, one hour of subjective time. He put the watch down and carefully, cautiously let go of it. Nothing changed. So it was not necessary for actual contact to be made throughout the red time interval. He saw a piece of broken shell a few feet away. He picked it up and placed it down on the cement right in Bonny Lee’s line of vision. He picked the watch up and pressed the stem with his thumb. The silver hand snapped all the way around back to twelve, and he was back in the bright movements of her world.

She started. She looked gray under her tan. She closed her eyes and swallowed and then reached and touched the fragment of shell. She moved it a few inches and shivered. She stared at him, and sounded close to tears as she said, “You gotta stop this kinda tricks, Kirby. Please.”

“What happened?”

“You saw it! Gawddamn it, you did it! All of a sudden, a hunk of shell is there. It didn’t grow or fall from any place or — it was just there!”

“How did you feel?”

“Terrible!”

“I mean, what did you feel?”

“Whattaya mean, sugar, what did I feel? I’m just looking where you say and then—” She stopped and peered at him and looked angry. “I get it now, you spooky bassar! You’re hypnotizing me! You’re not supposed to be able to do it to anybody doesn’t want it done. And I don’t like it. So cut it out, hear?”

“I’m not hypnotizing you, and stop getting sore. Now I want to try something else. If it works, it might frighten you at first, but—”

“No more, Kirby!”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to help me?”

“Sure, but—”

“And you love me?”

“I guess so, but—”

“Then let me try this, and I swear it won’t hurt you in any way, and I’ll explain it to you if it does work.”

She looked at him sullenly, dubiously, and then gave a nod of agreement. He moved over close to her and put his arm around her. He held the watch in both hands in front of her. “Put your hands over mine.”

She did so and said, “What has that old gold turnip watch g—”

The world was red and she was frozen, unyielding. Maybe you couldn’t take another person into the red world, take someone out of “real” time. He snapped the silver hand back.

“—ot to do with it?” she said.

“Try touching the watch this time.”

“Make up your mind,” she said. Again she was a statue in the redness.

He came back to reality. “This time, get your fingers like this, your thumb right against the stem, and now as I press down, you press down too and give a little turn and—”

He was alone on the bench, his arms holding a girl no longer there. The watch was gone also.

He had the immediate memory of closeness, of the lithe warmth of her. She had winked away into nothingness, and in its own special way, it was a nastier, more gut-wrenching shock than his initial foray into the red and silent world.

No, two could not go.

Kirby sat stunned with the realization of what he had done to her. She had neither the maturity nor the background to cope with the silent horror of that other world. He stared into distance and did not see her. Her primitive mind, shrewd though it was, would shatter under such an impact. He had a horrible thought. Perhaps, believing the watch to blame, she would hurl it into the sea. It would stop, and leave her forever trapped in that red time, where no one could see her or hear her, where all the rest of her life might pass within, perhaps, a half-hour of real time.

He sat dazed by guilt, by the enormity of what he had inadvertently, stupidly done to Bonny Lee Beaumont.