He went up the ladder, his grin like a half-moon slit in a muskmelon. Clete and I went behind him. I had the .25 semi-auto in my right hand. Then Carroll turned briefly and stared into my face. “Sorry I let you guys down. I hope this makes it right.”
“It’s okay,” I said. Then I stumbled. The semi-auto caught on the rail and fell from my hand and tumbled into the darkness.
Carroll never faltered. He went through the hatch and took a burst from the Kalashnikov in the chest and the face. Shondell was sitting down, his back propped against the console; his mouth resembled a horizontal keyhole where he had bitten off half of his upper lip, exposing his teeth. Carroll went down on his face and I knew I was next. I saw the glee in Shondell’s eyes as he raised the muzzle of his weapon. I had no defense, no moat or castle behind which to hide. This time it was for reaclass="underline" In two seconds I would be spaghetti on the bulkhead, and Clete would catch the next burst and tumble on top of me, and the weapon that couldn’t get us in Vietnam would have gotten even at last.
But that’s not what happened. Shondell pulled the trigger and the firing pin snapped on a dud. I had never seen a man look so surprised and so afraid. In the corner of my eye, I saw Penelope getting to her feet. “Run, Dave,” she said.
I didn’t have time. Clete almost knocked me down. He kicked the Kalashnikov from Shondell’s hands and pulled him to his feet and slammed his face on a glass-covered chart table. I had not seen the emergency flare he was carrying in his side pocket, but there it was. He tore off the cap and banged the striker on the tip. There was a spark, then the flare was aflame, hissing like a snake. Clete shoved it over Shondell’s teeth and down his throat.
I tried to pull Clete away from Shondell but to no avail. I knew he had gone back in time and was walking with the Jewish woman and her three daughters to a gas chamber at Auschwitz. I stepped back and did not try to intervene.
He grabbed Shondell by the neck and began beating his head on the chart table. The glass did not break, but Shondell’s head did. It broke the way a flower pot full of dirt does, and then it came apart, a sanguine mist rising from Shondell’s hair. Clete couldn’t or wouldn’t stop. He knotted the neck of Shondell’s shirt and coat in his fists and hammered the remnants of Shondell’s head against the edge of the glass until Clete’s hands slipped loose and Shondell slid to the deck, his neck a stump.
Clete stared down at Shondell’s body as though he did not know where it had come from. Penelope was pressed against the bulkhead, her skin and purple dress freckled with blood and brain matter. There was no fear in her face, only dismay and perhaps disappointment.
“What did you expect, Penelope?” I said. “Where did you think this would end?”
“Look!” she said, pointing at the sailboat as it crossed in front of the yacht. “There’s Isolde on the deck with Adonis. If you had just listened to me and waited.”
“Can I ask you a question, Miss Penelope?” Clete said.
“What?”
“Do you know where I could put together a pitcher of Jack on shaved ice with a few mint leaves on top and a lime slice or two? I’d be in your debt.”
Small hailstones began clicking on the ceiling of the bridge, then grew in size and volume and velocity until they were bouncing like Ping-Pong balls all over our ship, their cool white purity shutting out the world, chastening the wind, denting the waves and swells, creating an operatic clanging of ice and steel that Beethoven’s Fifth couldn’t match.
But it wasn’t over. I’ll try to explain. See, it’s got everything to do with Clete Purcel. As Clete would say, I’ll give you the straight gen, Ben. I wouldn’t give you a shuck, Chuck.
Epilogue
Here’s the minutiae of the situation, although Clete and Father Julian and I don’t wish to visit it anymore, and when we go out for dinner, we talk about the world that others see and live in and pretend their vision of things is the correct one.
Johnny fired up the pontoon plane anchored at the stilt house and flew himself and Isolde into Mexico, and for many years their music was a doorway into the past for those of us who wanted to hold on to what was best in our youthful days. Penelope and Adonis grew prematurely old, as though they had outlived their time. I saw her on occasion at the racetrack in New Orleans or in a restaurant in the Quarter, and she was always polite and demure, but for just a second her eyes would linger on mine and her face would become warm and contemplative, and whether imaginary or not, I would smell her perfume, even feel it wrapping around me, like the heavy odor of magnolia on a cool spring night, and I would hear a warning bell at a train crossing and make an excuse and get out of New Orleans as quickly as I could.
But this is not what I wanted to tell you about. I have learned little in life, acquired no wisdom, and given up dealing with the great mysteries. Stonewall Jackson talked about mystifying the enemy. I’ve got news for the general. You don’t need to mystify anyone. On balance, our best thinking has been a disaster from birth to the grave.
What happened to Shondell’s yacht? We don’t know. It disappeared, with his body and the bodies of his employees. I saw it go under from the deck of the sailboat, the keel rolling out of the waves, black smoke gushing from the portholes and open hatches. Maybe it slipped off the continental shelf. Why not? There’s a German submarine down there, its crew still on board. Maybe Mark Shondell found the company he deserved.
But let’s look again at the larger story. Leslie and her daughter also disappeared, probably forever, at least in tangible form. However, I see her and Elizabeth with Gideon in my sleep. I even feel her fingers touch my brow, and I know I’m not alone. Clete says he saw them inside a white fog off Key West. He takes the tale a step farther. He says Gideon has come twice in the early A.M to his apartment on St. Ann Street, like a brother-in-arms who cannot let go of shared memories.
Clete has always been a closet bibliophile. For years, in a small room overlooking his courtyard, he stored hundreds of paperback books he bought in secondhand stores and yard sales, most of them about American history and the War Between the States. He read and reread James Street’s Tap Roots and By Valour and Arms, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, MacKinlay Kantor’s Andersonville, Bruce Catton’s A Stillness at Appomattox, and all the works of Shelby Foote.
He also loved to visit Civil War battlefields. Not long ago Clete was visiting a site near the place where Grant had begun his Wilderness Campaign, which would eventually culminate at Appomattox Courthouse. Coincidentally, that same weekend, a collection of neo-Nazis and Klansmen had assembled in a city park, supposedly to oppose the removal of Confederate statuary. In a torchlight march, they chanted an anti-Semitic mantra of hatred and paranoia and carried the battle flag of Robert Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia next to Hitler’s swastika. The next day one of their members plowed his car into a crowd, injuring many and killing a young woman.
Clete left town, sickened by what he saw.
Late at night, back in New Orleans in the midst of an electric storm, Clete said Gideon sat down with him at the back of a poolroom. But he no longer resembled the reptilian figure who had haunted our lives. He was clean-shaven and clear-skinned and dressed in a corduroy coat and work pants and suspenders and a floppy hat an Italian vineyard owner might wear.
“The man Shondell served is in your midst, Mr. Purcel,” Gideon said. “But you should not worry about him. He will be destroyed by his own machinations.”