Torch

15

A smiling Beni Ho crept toward Carver, who was teetering without his cane. When Carver turned to see if the cane was on the ground behind him, he saw that there was no ground. He was on the edge of an abyss that whistled and echoed with grief and loneliness. Ho stopped a few feet short of him, and with a wide, wide grin, extended a single, slender forefinger and nudged Carver into the abyss. As he plunged through blackness, wind or a scream whistling in his ears, he heard a voice say, “Stay away from that route if at all possible.”

He realized he was no longer hurtling through blackness but was lying on his back on perspiration-soaked sheets, listening to the clock radio blare the morning traffic report.

Beth was beside him, sleeping through the back-up on Magellan, the accident on the Camille drawbridge, the nude jogger running with a dog on the coast highway. The clock radio was on her side of the bed.

“Beth!” he called fuzzily, still staring at the ceiling.

There was only the ranting of the radio. A disc jockey had taken over from the guy in the traffic copter and was yammering almost faster than the ear could follow.

“Beth!”

“Whazzit, lover?”

“Turn that damned thing off!”

“ ’Zat?”

“The clock radio-hit the button!”

The deejay said, “Doin’ the rock an’ roll review to get you in the mood for the office zoo. We’ll play while you’re on your way for pay. We’re gonna spin till you clock in. Music back through the years just for your ears!”

Stretched out on her stomach, her cheek mushed on her extended right arm, Beth opened her eyes sleepily and smiled at Carver.

Carver said, “Clock radio. Please!”

“Idea, Fred, is the device is s’pose to wake you up, get you vertical.”

As Carver rolled onto his side and groped for his cane, he bumped it with his wrist and it clattered to the floor. Little Richard began to scream at him. He rolled onto his back again, bumping his bald pate on the wooden headboard. Ordinarily he liked Little Richard. But not at the moment. Not at the moment at all.

“Beth!”

She languidly reached out with a long arm, and silence dropped over the room like a blanket.

After a while she said, “I’ll make coffee.”

Carver said nothing. He found his cane, sat up with one leg on the floor, then swiveled around to slump on the edge of the mattress. He heard Beth, behind him, climb out of bed. The springs whined as she stood up. He sat staring at nothing, listening to her bare feet pad across the plank floor, hoping she’d get a splinter in a toe. She never had and didn’t this time. Probably the woman could walk barefoot on hot coals. Pipes bonged and banged in the wall, and tap water ran for the coffee.

Too late on the stakeout last night, Carver told himself. It had been almost midnight when he’d driven away from Gretch’s apartment. He’d observed little other than old Hodgkins standing as motionless as a statue for half an hour, holding a hose at his hip and watering the pathetic lawn. Like a fountain statue of a gunslinger. The great patience of the old often amazed Carver. It was something you noticed in Florida.

Drawing a deep breath, he stood up over his cane, steadied himself, and walked into the bathroom. He rinsed out his mouth, then splashed cold water on his face to wake up. Looked in the mirror. Looked quickly away. Then he went back out to his dresser, got out his red pair of swimming trunks, and sat down on the bed and eased into them.

“Coffee before or after?” Beth asked, when he was standing again and fastening the trunks’ drawstring.

“After,” he told her, and got a white towel from the bathroom and left the cabin.

The morning was cloudless but still cool. He hobbled toward the beach, walking with difficulty when he left the wooden steps and trod on sandy soil.

Near the surf line, he stuck his cane in the sand, dropped his towel beside it, and crawled backward into the surf. The water felt cold at first, waking him all the way. When a large swell roared in and burst onto the beach, he shoved himself seaward with both arms and let the wave’s backwash carry him out to deeper water where he was floating free, then swimming.

He swam straight out from shore, using long, reaching strokes and breathing deeply and evenly. Then he treaded water for a while, looking back in at the cottage where Beth was brewing coffee, or maybe sitting at the table by now sipping it from her mug that was lettered with reproductions of newspapers’ flubbed captions, such as Police Help Dog Bite Victim and Prison Warden Says Inmates May Have 3 Guns. Looking in at his life, really, and wondering why it had turned out as it had, what the mainspring was that powered its clockwork. But nobody ever really understood that one. Donna and Mark Winship hadn’t understood. He thought of beautiful Maggie Rourke, grieving by the sea for her dead illicit romance that had been doomed from the beginning. Love could be such a disease, sometimes fatal. Sorrow swelled in his throat for Maggie, who was still suffering because she was the one still alive. People only thought they knew the reasons why they acted, while they kept on loving and hating and moving through life toward death and not understanding that, either.

He floated on his back for several minutes, staring now in the opposite direction, out to sea, focusing his gaze on a small patch of white sail. For a moment he felt an almost overwhelming impulse to swim toward it even though it was too far away to reach. Then he turned back toward the shore and the cottage and Beth.

He entered the cottage with his towel slung across his shoulders, his feet leaving wet prints on the floor. The scent of freshly perked coffee made him hungry. Beth was standing at the stove, wearing white panties and bra and spraying a frying pan with Pam. So she intended to prepare breakfast as well as coffee. Maybe she’d planned it that way from the moment she’d heard the blaring clock radio. Maybe. She was a difficult one to read. A surprising nest-feathering, domestic streak sometimes surfaced in her, like a sheen of something elemental from deep water. Though not often.

Carver wondered if she’d ever considered becoming a mother. They never talked about that.

He showered, dressed in light gray slacks, a black tee shirt and gray socks, black loafers. Beth was still standing at the stove when he came back. It was getting warm in the cottage. When she saw him, she walked over and switched on the air conditioner. His coffee was already poured and a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, and sausage links was on the breakfast counter. He sat on one of the high stools and sipped coffee. Beth disappeared behind the folding screen that partitioned off the cottage’s sleeping area, then returned and sat across from him, wearing his blue terrycloth robe now. She was carrying her oversized mug with the newspaper captions on it. Carver could see Man Minus Ear Waives Hearing. Maybe this was the real news, that the world made no sense. Steam rose from the mug and caught the morning light like a prism, playing faint colors over the counter.

She said, “Anybody show at Gretch’s apartment last night?”

He buttered a slice of toast and shook his head no. “What about the missing pages in the catalogs? They tell you anything?” He was sure they hadn’t, or she would have told him by now.

“I’m still working at it,” she said somewhat curtly. “So far, I’ve only been able to find two of the current catalogs. I’m driving in to Orlando today and visit a mail-order maniac I know, see if he can get me the other, older ones.”

“What’s on the missing pages you managed to match up?” he asked.

“Men’s sport coats and accessories on one, beachwear on the other.”

“Natty clothes, like a gigolo might wear?”

“Depends on how you view silk jackets with eelskin elbow patches.”

“So maybe the missing pages contain items Gretch ordered from the catalogs.”

“Except the order forms are intact in every catalog that was in his closet. And most of the catalogs look as if they’ve barely been leafed through. I think there’s some connecting thread, and I’ll know it when I see the other catalog pages.”

“Maybe he’s building a secret weapon out of tie clasps and sunglasses,” Carver said.

“Maybe.”

“More likely, he simply ran out of toilet paper now and then.”

Beth lowered her coffee mug and looked thoughtful. It was an explanation she hadn’t considered. She’d been raised desperately poor, and it was a possibility she might take quite seriously.

“Keep matching catalog pages,” he said.

“I intend to.”

“I’m going to give up on Gretch’s apartment for a while and watch Maggie Rourke.” He took a bite of toast and chewed while Beth gazed at him.

“Because she’s fun to watch?” she asked.

He washed down the toast with a long pull of coffee that was still hot enough to burn the back of his throat. “Because, unlike Gretch, she can at least be found.”

Beth turned her back on him and stood up. Leaving her mug sitting on the counter, she walked slowly over to the stove and lifted a sausage from the pan and began nibbling at it, still not looking at him.

Letting him know she didn’t completely believe him.

He wasn’t certain of the truth himself.

Nagging Wife Critical After Hammer Attack, he read on the mug.