Daniel, I took a great breath, and dove. The vacuum established by the flooded hull of the kayak, as it plunged slowly into darkness, imparted itself to my body through the water. I was tugged after, like a fly in the paltry maelstrom of a shower drain. To what dread terminus would that watery engine deliver me?
Blessedly, I had filled my lungs before going under, and my capacity in this regard eclipses that of human beings conventionally propagated. The night above and the murkiness of the medium through which I swam conspired to blind me; and yet I saw not only filamentous pondwrack and slime-fouled cypress roots, but also the charcoaled body of my erstwhile paramour and the whalebone frame of my kayak. Indeed, descending, I saw the blackened monkey face and the brittle limbs of Giselle McKissic woven into the pond’s liquid papyrus. Or believe I saw them.
How to extricate the woman from the sinking kayak? I could think of no way. Therefore, I spoke an abashed farewell and faced away from her watery grave to find the world again. The instant I did so the tenebrous vision I had had of that scene, a tableau mayhap illuminated by pond phosphor, ichthyoidal incandescence, and my own remorseful longings, flashed into blackness.
Why not commit myself forever, I wondered, to that extinguishing medium and die with Giselle? She had taken her life to punish herself for crediting even a transitory happiness, but also to punish Mister JayMac for denying her a permanent one, and me for yielding to her blandishments only to forswear my desperate surrender when conscience unpunctually reasserted itself. (Indeed, in yielding to her appeals, I may have sought to cuckold, belatedly, my creator, for in each union with Giselle I always saw the visage of Elizabeth Lavenza, my creator’s bride, whom I cruelly murdered.) I did not deserve to die with Giselle. She was not my wife, and I had loved her, whether carnally or reverentially, for too brief a time to sleep beside her forever in her aqueous mausoleum.
I surfaced and swam back to shore. Muscles and Curriden had preceded me. No one had any notion where Mister JayMac had gone or what we should do. Evans averred that Mister JayMac, to celebrate our pennant and also to benumb himself to the burden of Hoey’s crippling assault on you, Daniel, had repaired to the arms of a fancy woman in the Oglethorpe Hotel. Several acceded to the probability of this last speculation.
Muscles said, “To hell with that. Heggie, call the cops, fire department too. To help bring the body up.”
“Tomorrow,” Lamar Knowles said. “It’s too blamed dark to grapple for a corpse.”
“Yeah, well, if Mister JayMac was here,” Muscles said, “he’d set up floodlights and have her out in a hour, tops.”
“He isn’t here,” Lamar Knowles said.
Euclid came down from the boardinghouse. He wriggled through the men on the edge of the pond and halted before me, daunted, I think, by my fell and water-lagged aspect.
“Miz Hoey say you wen ouw wi Mr Hoey. Say Mr Hoey ain come back. Say, do you know wha hopn toom?”
“No. I don’t.” I pushed through the crowd, all too aware that soon Linda Jane Hoey and the local gendarmerie would discover the injured Hoey and deduce correctly that I had broken his legs and torn his tongue from his mouth. It seemed, Daniel, that the span of my ill-fated liberty among your own kind was ending; likewise, my hopes of finding an accomplishment and thus a meaning in my second life through the instrumentality of baseball. A welter of perplexities gripped me as I entered McKissic House, climbed the stairs, and burst into our garret.
First, Daniel, through wrath and violence I had nullified all my efforts to atone for the nefariousness of my first life. My brutal treatment of Hoey and my wicked incognizance of the depths of Giselle’s melancholia had evicted me from an unchartered society of human saints in which I had always assumed myself a member. Second, by these acts I had wronged my benefactor, Jordan McKissic, repaying trust with deviltry and throwing down by a type of roundabout homicide his marriage. Third, I had recklessly annulled the investments of both the Hellbenders and the Phillies,for my only choices now were giving up to the civil authorities or fleeing into the night.
Looking about my portion of our room, I found that Giselle had purloined some of my belongings: notebooks, letters, clothes, souvenirs of the Oongpekmut, etc. “Part of you I take with me” read a note on my bed. Indeed, these items she had perversely-aye, and poignantly-included in her self-immolation and her submersion. All were destroyed; their char drifted through the trash and bacteria in the pond, or lay sodden and lost in its ebony bottom ooze. I recalled the grinding wretchedness of my worst days, whether as Frankenstein’s bewildered get or as the heartsick widower of Kariak.
I wept, Daniel. Weeping, I folded into a bag those clothes that Giselle had not taken. I advanced upon the stairs. I heard the downstairs telephone ring. I heard someone seize the instrument and speak. Momentarily, this person-Vito Mariani?-cried out to the Hellbenders in the parlor, “They found Hoey in Alligator Park, but he’s dead, you guys! Poor ol Bucko’s dead!”
I hurried down both flights of stairs and quietly let myself out. Then I betook myself through the most sparsely populated regions of town-school yards, alleyways, pine copses-until it seemed unlikely that either my team-mates or the police would catch me and remand me to prison.
For all these reasons, Daniel, I have not visited you, nor reported to the club in Philadelphia. In my fugitive state, several agonies continually plague me, chief among them the murder-or murders-that I have committed. Also of scourging primacy are the heinous crimes inflicted upon the Hoeys and upon you, Daniel, as my comrade in hope. I might better have avenged you, I see now, by acquitting myself well in the major leagues than by savaging the man who debarred your own elevation there.
I am on the lam. This self-concealing style of life is not unfamiliar to me. Many years ago, I practiced it in the waste tracts of Alaska, becoming a creature of legend to the whites who journeyed through. Thus, the Oongpekmut called me Inyookootuk, the Hiding Man. I am again become Inyookootuk. In this role, my size notwithstanding, I have twice returned to Highbridge to befriend Linda Jane Hoey and her children, as I befriended the cottagers De Lacey in my first life. I leave canned food items on her threshold and chopped wood for her stove or fire grates in a box out back. These pathetic kindnesses do not redeem my crime or return the Hoeys’ dead provider; I draw from them, however, a selfish consolation.
In our minds, as well as in our acts, we all struggle for self-absolution. I do not believe in my maker, Daniel, for he did not believe in me. The God you worship seems at an unbridgeable remove. I would ask his forgiveness, but, as much as I wish to, I cannot regard myself as either his child or his ward. Therefore, sireless and alone, I devise salvific mental stratagems for myself, arcane apologia to justify and remit my sins. In the case of Hoey’s murder, I have settled upon two mitigating circumstances, the second more compelling than the first. How, you may ask, have I slipped the bonds of the Sixth Commandment?