The Killer Touch

Eleven

He rowed across the silent, oily sea. Behind him lay the main cluster of the Tobago Cays, four islands so close together that men could converse from one to the other and hardly raise their voices. He had searched all four without finding any sign of her; only some immense turtle shells where fishermen had long ago stopped for a feast. Now he rowed toward one lonely island a mile or so from the others. The fisherman in Mayero had called it Petit Tabac; it looked odd with a single palm tree growing from the low bush-covered mound in the center. He decided to land on the sand spit which curved out at the western end. Gray rocks bit through the surf around it, but the sea was calm enough to land without danger. He was thankful for the calm sea, with reservations, for it was a heavy, threatening quietness. And so hot. He took one hand off the oars and touched the soft blisters on his nose.

The man on Mayero had said: “Hurricane comin’.”

And Burt had said: “I’ve been hearing that since I came to the islands. When will it come?”

“Today,” said the man, and in that matter-of-fact way the islanders talk of death, had added: “You will die on the sea.”

Now Burt could see the black cloud like a low obsidian cliff on-the eastern horizon. He would have been thankful for rain — just a little. The sun was a white-hot rivet tacked to a blue-steel sheet of sky. Sweat made his palms slick on the oars and complicated the task of working the boat in through the rocks. He reached the line of low breakers and leaped out, seized the prow of the boat and dragged it up the steeply sloping beach. Damn, they made these things heavy. Not more than six feet long, and it must weigh a hundred pounds. It took all his strength to drag it ten feet above the surf-line. He reached beneath the thwart and took out an oilskin bag containing a tin of biscuits and two cans of bully beef. He tied it to his belt beside the plastic-handled fish-knife, then climbed up the slithering sand to the top of the mound.

The entire island was less than a quarter-mile long. It formed a narrow crescent which began where he stood and dwindled to a line of rocks on the eastern end. There the pelicans sat hunched over, like moviegoers waiting in the rain. He saw two structures of black rock, shaped like Navajo hogans. It was the only shelter on the island; she would be there if anywhere.

He jumped and slapped his ankle, saw the blood trickle down from the bite of a sandfly. He started down the beach. A gust of wind tore the breath from his lungs, stung his face with sand, and then was gone. He looked to the east and was appalled to see how the cloud had grown while he was beaching his boat. Now it covered the lower quarter of the eastern sky, black as approaching night. It was laced with red and yellow veinings of lightning, like mace on nutmeg. He felt a chill of foreboding and looked at his boat lying vulnerable on the sand. He ran back, uncoiled the heavy line and tied it to a jutting boulder. Then he ran back down the beach, his canvas sneakers slapping against the hard-packed sand.

She sat with her back against one of the stone shelters, her head sunk on her chest, her eyes fixed on her hands lying palm up across her thighs. Burt stared in frozen shock, his triumph at finding her wiped out by the appalling sight of her condition. The tangled mass of her hair was bleached a pale orange on top, hiding her face except for the peeling tip of her sun-blistered nose. Her long-sleeved denim shirt was open at the neck; the skin beneath it was welted by mosquito bites. Her long flannel slacks, once white, were now a stained, spotted gray. Her legs were stretched out before her, widespread, with the cuffs pulled up to her calves. Above her dirty white socks, her ankles were raw and bleeding from the bites of sandflies.

“Tracy Keener,” he said.

She didn’t look up. Beside her he saw the biscuit tie which he decided must contain her supplies. On the sand lay an open untouched can of beef, its contents dried and green and covered with flies. On a plastic bag lay a needle, its tip stained the color of rust. He knew why she didn’t answer; she had just hit herself, and was now taking that first wild soaring ride which addicts call the flash. He knelt and raised her head.

“Tracy. I’ve come to take you off the island.”

She gave him a glazed, unfocused look. “In a minute, baby. You’re new, aren’t you? Did Rolf come?”

So... she thought he was Rolf’s man. He decided not to tell her he was taking her away from Rolf; the tie between an addict and the supplier was umbilical.

“Your husband couldn’t make it. Come on. Let’s go.”

“In... in a minute.”

“We can’t wait. Look.”

He held her chin and turned her face toward the east. The cloud was growing visible, sending blunt stubby fingers into the sky above them. Even the birds had grown strangely quiet.

“Pretty,” she said. “What is it?”

“That’s a storm. A bad one.” He spoke as though explaining to a child. “We’ve got to get off before it hits. This island isn’t more than twenty feet high. We’re going to one of the higher islands. Understand?”

“Uh-huh.” She smiled dreamily. “I like your voice.”

“Oh, hell!” He seized her wrist and pulled her to her feet. Her legs were like wet spaghetti; she crumpled to the sand like an empty pair of overalls. He lifted her in his arms and carried her up the beach. She draped her arm around his neck and hummed as they went along, keeping time to his footsteps in loose sand. Her lightness surprised him; the skin slid over her ribs, and he felt the hard ridge of her spine beneath his aims.

“Haven’t you been eating?” he asked.

“I bet Rolf told you to ask that. Eat, Tracy. I can’t have everybody knowing my wife’s a hypo. Eating is like putting a tongue depressor in my mouth.” She giggled softly and laid her head on his shoulder. “I get everything I need through the skin — Oh!” She stiffened. “Put me down.”

“We’re halfway there.”

“But I forgot my outfit! I can’t leave it!”

Her back arched and her thin body twisted in his arms. Rather than hurt her, he loosened his grip and let her fall on the sand. She was halfway running when she touched ground; she was off like a rabbit, leaving him with the sleeve which had ripped from the shoulder seam. She ran with surprising speed against the wind, into the clouds which roiled up before her like black smoke from a refinery fire. Her shirt flapped straight but from beneath her armpits; each rib and each joint of her spine showed starkly white, as though the skin and flesh had been stripped away to leave her skeleton bare. His pursuit was slowed by his greater bulk; he sank deeply into the sand, and the rising blasts of wind stopped him like a brick wall, only to dissolve and leave him staggering forward until he hit another blast.

He reached the stone shelters as she was tucking in her, shirt. The plastic bag formed a pregnant bulge above her belt.

“You pulled me down off the high,” she said with faint sullenness. “I can walk now.”

Going back was easy; the wind hammered against their backs like a giant fist. Surf boiled up around their knees until they had to climb the steep beach and walk in the prickly bush which grew at the center of the island. Above their heads the wind plucked a leaf from the palm tree and flicked it far out to sea.

Burt stopped when he saw the sand spit where he’d left his boat. The sea charged in from both sides, crushing together at the center and raising his boat high on a bubbling geyser of foam, rolling it over and over like a medicine ball on the feet of an athlete, then leaving it half-careened and filled with water. He turned and saw that Tracy had sat down in the sand and was gazing up at the flying debris.

“Can you climb a tree?” he shouted against the wind.

“Of course,” she said serenely. “But I don’t want to.”

“You’ve got to! We can’t get off the—!”

He stopped, for suddenly his voice rang out into absolute stillness. He looked around, and in the weird green light he saw a sight which made him doubt his vision. The island seemed to be slowly rising from the sea. Water poured off their little mound of land, cascading over the rocks, forming little torrents and whirlpools, twisting through acres of barnacled coral. He saw fish left gasping on the sand; he saw a manta ray as big as a barn roof stranded in six inches of water, its huge wings flapping like those of an enormous black moth dying from DDT. He saw a hundred crayfish scurrying between the rocks, frantically seeking the water which had left them; he saw a hundred mounded acres of rock veiled with dripping seaweed, studded with elkhorn and mushroom coral.

In the instant that his eyes encompassed the spectacle of the ocean floor exposed to the hostile air, he saw the reason for it. The sea was leaving the island, sucked up into the blackness which thundered toward them with a sound like a thousand horses drinking at once; coming in like a huge black whale which drank the ocean dry as it came. Burt stood for an instant frozen in a fear so great it was almost ecstasy.

Then he was picking her up and carrying her to the palm tree, ignoring the thorns which tore at his legs. He propped her against the tree, but she slid down, her body limp and boneless. He jammed his knee into her stomach and held her there while his hands tore at her belt buckle...

Her hands fought him feebly. “Hey, what—?”

“I’m going to strap you to the tree with your belt.”

She giggled. “But my pants will fall.”

“That’s not the worst thing that can happen.” He jerked her belt from the loops. The slacks sagged to her hips and caught there. He removed his own belt and joined the two, then passed them around the tree and fastened them around her stomach. He pulled it so tight that her rib cage bulged out above it.

“I can’t breathe!” she gasped.

He looked down and saw the bewilderment in her dark brown eyes. She didn’t understand what was happening.

“Shut up,” he said, his voice roughened by a sudden protective emotion. He peeled off his shirt, wrapped it around the oilskin bundle of food, and tied it to the strap which held her.

While he worked, he was aware of the light getting dimmer, like a lamp turned down, changing from yellow to green, and then to blue. Suddenly it became a deep purple twilight. He was gasping for air, pulling it into his lungs and finding it hot and with a strange electric taste. He looked toward the east, out past the tongue of naked dripping rock, and saw the heaving, oily swell of the tidal wave. It seemed to be growing larger as it came, rising higher and higher until he had to look up to see its crest. He could hear it, like an approaching locomotive, crashing over those two flimsy stone huts as though they were matchboxes...

He leaped for the tree and wrapped his arms around it He pressed his face to the tree just as the water struck. His face ground into the rough palm trunk. He tried to gasp but there was no air, only water which had become a lashing monster wrapped around them. It was like being shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. His feet left the ground and stretched out behind him. His arms popped in their sockets and he laced his fingers, willing them to grow together and never part, even though his arms might be ripped from his shoulders...

Then the water was gone, driven on by the wind. The wind was a demon of fury bent on his destruction; it peeled his eyelids apart and hammered his eyes into his skull; it rammed its fingers up his nostrils and jammed a fist down his throat, collapsing his lungs and bloating his stomach. Above him, the palm fronds were stripped away like dandelion fluff blown by a child. He bent his head and pressed it against the tree; he could feel the fibers straining in the wood and hoped it would hold; he wondered how Tracy was, but he couldn’t see her. The darkness was total. The rain struck in smothering sheets like wet flapping canvas; the water rushed over the mound and tore at his waist. He felt the sand eroding beneath him, sinking him lower and lower, and he had a sudden fear that their tree might be gouged out by the roots after having withstood the terrible force of the tidal wave. He wrapped his legs around the tree, pried one hand free, and groped around the trunk. His heart sank as his hand touched nothing. He groped downward and touched her naked back; the shirt had been torn away and she was slumped forward hanging from the belts. He seized her hair and pulled her back against the tree. His hand touched her lips and felt them moving. He extended his embrace to include her, feeling the small softness of her breasts beneath his arms.

And then he ceased to think. Time is your enemy, he told himself; to endure you must become a creature without continuity in time, you are a May fly existing on the razor’s edge of the instant. Eternity is now; the next breath and the next heartbeat will be another man’s problem. Don’t let the fingers slip, don’t let Tracy’s head sag... don’t think. The world has turned feral; all the elements are united against you, but don’t think about that. There’ll be no punishment if you survive or don’t; all fear of the future is meaningless, for this is Hell...

He had no idea how long it lasted, but a sudden peace descended like a cotton blanket. The blackness surrounded them; it was like standing in a huge silo with a tiny skylight far above. Burt looked around in the unearthly, yellow green twilight. They stood on an almost barren ridge of rock laced with tiny pockets of sand. The silence was broken only by the gurgle of runoff water and the slopping of fish trapped on the land. He saw why their tree had remained intact; it was rooted in a pocket of earth in the solid rock.

He felt Tracy move under his hands. “Please, you’re hurting...”

It was slow work, for his joints had locked together and each uncoupling was agony. When she was free, she straightened and breathed deeply. All that remained of her shirt was the collar and a tattered strip of cloth on the right side. Suddenly she gasped and began to tear at the belt.

“Don’t,” he said. “We’re not through yet.”

She kept tugging, and he crawled around the tree and seized her wrists. “Stay put, Tracy! We’re just in the center. There’s another jolt coming just like the last one.”

She looked at him in terror. “But it’s gone! My kit is gone. I had it right here—” She pressed her palm to the sunken cavity of her stomach. “I’ve got to find it! Help me look!”

“Look?” He waved his arm. “Where would you look? It’s five miles at sea by now.”

She looked around, dazed, as though she had just realized that there had been a hurricane. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and screamed up at the tiny circle of light. “Rolf! Rolf! Where are you?”

He seized her and shook her until her jaw wobbled, and then she collapsed against his chest and called Rolf’s name in a weak and plaintive voice. Her utter dependence on Rolf angered him.

“How heavy was your habit?”

“I’m not sure.” Her voice was muffled against his chest. “I used to hold it down to one capsule a day, but then Rolf didn’t seem to care, so I gradually took more and more. When you have it laid on you like that, you cabaret all the time. I used... maybe three, four a day. Maybe five, I don’t know.”

“You poor nitwit.” Burt was appalled; a person with a habit that heavy could die if left suddenly without it He’d known it to happen in small back-country jails: The addict thrown into a cell and left to kick the drug cold-turkey... convulsions, incessant vomiting, muscle spasms so strong they can throw joints out of place. Eventually the heart bursts, the lungs rupture...

He looked down into her eyes, saw the opaque film which, it was said, an addict never loses. Behind that, he saw fear... and dependence.

“I’ll die... won’t I?”

She wanted reassurance, and he wanted to give it. He remembered the letters and realized that the prospect of doing without the drug could start her down that same blind alley. He also remembered that he had been unable to see his boat on the sand spit, and that they might be a long time in leaving the island.

“We must get to St. Vincent tomorrow,” he lied. “I know a doctor there...”

When the next blow struck, he covered her with his body. Hours passed with the wind clawing at his back and from time to time the woman stirred against him. He felt a futile anger at the turn of events. Even if he brought her alive through this, she’d have another hell to go through tomorrow.