Tours of the Black Clock

9

A COUPLE MORE DAYS and Marc still hadn’t left. It wasn’t long after that, on an afternoon when the sun broke glancingly through the fog, that the old man plopped with a thump down on a fruit crate near the side of the boat; thirty or forty quarters fell through his fingers and skipped across the puddles of the deck. Marc instinctively knelt to retrieve them, and only when he looked almost casually at old Zeno did he see a face that was as white as his own hair. A fat man with a hat and camera said, “Is he OK?” and began picking up quarters. Marc shook Zeno’s shoulder and said, Hey. When Zeno didn’t respond the boy said, Old man? He still didn’t respond. Oh Jesus, the boy exclaimed, torn between attending to Zeno and steering the boat, which was now beginning to veer wildly off course. Other passengers were looking around in confusion. Finally the old man’s breathing resumed, his head lifted and he peered around, but he still didn’t move and everything he said was jumbled and without sense. When the boat reached shore he couldn’t feel his legs. Marc took Zeno into the boathouse and put him on the mattress. He canceled the rest of the day’s schedule. He got into a fight with the fat man in the hat and camera over the quarters he’d pocketed. “Shouldn’t have to pay to come back anyway,” the man protested, “people should have the right to go back where they came from.” Not on my river, said Marc.

Zeno was back out on the boat the next day for a couple of trips over, but his legs still weren’t right and things said to him had to be repeated. Then he collapsed on the rail and almost fell in the water. For the next several days the business didn’t run at all. Judy came over to see where everyone had gone. “You could have let me known,” she said. Not on that island, the boy answered back. The two discussed getting a doctor while Zeno lay on the mattress listening. “Forget doctors,” he croaked, in one of his more lucid moments.

Marc woke that night when the light of the gaslamp was only a point and the sound of Zeno’s voice in the dark was only a scrape of life against death. “I set it on fire,” Marc heard him, “are you listening? That house on the pillars out over the river, forty years ago. …” There was a pause; in the dark Marc, from his side of the boathouse, could feel the old man struggling. He began to say, Don’t struggle; but the old man said first, “Say nothing and listen. I … are you listening? The hand that set it on fire was my own and now I have to tell someone. Because a man died, see. A man burnt up. City man, some kind of gangster or private eye … your mother knows. He came looking for her. He waited in that house over the river, and at night when he slept I set it on fire. Never quite knew why I did it. So I have his ashes on my soul now, now I have to tell someone because your mother’s knowing isn’t enough. She’ll die with the secret the same way she hasn’t spoken to me since it happened, it’s not a secret that should be died with. …” Marc heard him gasp. He tried to keep the old man talking, if only to reel him back from whatever he was sinking into. Old man, called Marc. Nothing. Old man?