“No! Now, Cora… Damn it! Don’t take it that way!”
“I’m not taking offense.”
“But you’re backing away from me. I can feel it”
“Backing? Or being pushed?”
“I…”
I stood up, but there was no place to go. The two leering youths were drifting on, and I looked after them almost hopelessly as they started their engines again.
I sat down, hanging my feet over the edge of the flat roof, my back to Cora. I drummed my heels on the fiberglass of the upper hull. The robot navigator mumbled its data in a madman’s silence.
“Don, it’s really none of my business where your money comes from. All I know is that you once told me that it amounted to eight thousand dollars a month being deposited in your bank account, and—”
“When did I tell you that?”
“A few nights ago. You may have been more asleep than awake,” she said. “It sounded likely, though. You seem to lead a pretty comfortable life.”
Beneath its carefully cultivated tan, I could feel my face turning red.
“You want to know where my money comes from?” I shouted. “Well, I don’t!”
Why should she be able to make me feel like a child confessing some secret sin? I felt a mad urge to turn and strike her across the face.
There was a pause. Then, “You don’t what?” she said, achieving a new note of puzzlement.
My throat was suddenly tight, my head splitting.
“I don’t want to think about it!” I got out at last, the words coming in a rush.
Then I turned back to her—and suddenly my hand, which had been threatening to strike her a moment earlier now shot out and seized her wrist. I was unable to say another word, but I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to let her go.
Her features took on a look of indignation which faded almost as rapidly as it occurred. As she stared at me, it was replaced by an expression of pity, concern.
“Don… Oh boy, you’ve got troubles—don’t you?”
“Yes.”
It was a relief to be able to say that much. Troubles? Yes, by then I knew I had troubles. I had no idea what they were. But troubles I had. I could see that. She’d helped to gain me that much of an insight
“You’re going to have to let my arm go,” she said, trying to recover lightness. Her bra, imperfectly fastened, was threatening to fall off. “Here comes another houseboat.”
I looked up. It was just rounding a gentle bend, eighty meters or so ahead. As I watched, my fingers relaxing until her wrist slipped free, a sun-reddened male face protruded on the pilot’s side.
“Looks like Willy Boy Matthews himself,” I said, surprising myself with what struck me as a humorous insight, coming totally out of left field.
I suddenly knew that some kind of internal crisis had just been passed, and I could feel myself half-choking with relief. I still had Cora with me. Whatever else, I felt that I wasn’t going to break off with her.
“Willy…? Whatever made you think of him?” Cora sounded anxious to keep talking to me, about anything at all, while her hands were busy with refastening.
“I don’t know. I guess the celebrities of yesteryear just pop up sometimes.”
The face in the passing boat, seen now at close range, didn’t really look much like that of the defunct revivalist preacher as I remembered him from screen and page. It was a gross, impressionistic resemblance more than anything else. When the mind really wants to be diverted, it seizes upon the handiest things.
“Now, do you want to tell me about your troubles?” she said. “I promise that nothing horrible will happen if you do.”
I am not sure that I believed that, but I wanted to. For reasons not clear to me, I felt desperate, on the verge of tears. And it seemed a shame to waste all that trauma. Just a little more effort, I told myself, and I could get it all said. She would know as much as I did. We would be closer, where we had just been on the verge of moving apart. How could anything horrible come of it, despite the irrational forebodings which had come to dance upon my decks?
“All right,” I said, looking out over the water to the places where it sparkled. “I don’t know where the money comes from.”
I paused a moment, hoping she’d say something. But she remained silent.
“So long as I don’t push matters,” I went on, “so long as I don’t try to find out, everything will be okay. I just know it. It comes in on an EFT—you know, an electronic funds transfer—with no identification as to its source. About a year ago I did go into the bank and ask them how hard it would be to trace it. They said there was no way they could run it down on the information they had. Then I got sick for a couple of days, and I haven’t thought about it since. But as long as I don’t wonder about the money, I’m all right. Everything’s fine.”
Those last two words rang in my head. I had recited them as if by rote. I couldn’t see how I had come to say them in light of the situation I had just described. Yet I had done more than that. For a long while I had believed them.
I raised my hand and rubbed my forehead, my eyes. The headache was still there. When I lowered my hand I realized that it was shaking.
Suddenly, Cora’s hands were on my shoulders.
“Take it easy, Don,” she said. “What I’d thought was that maybe you were getting some sort of disability payments. I mean, what with the head scars and all. But that’s certainly nothing to be… ashamed of.”
I realized that I was acting as if I were ashamed. I’d no idea why I should, though. Mostly now, I was afraid to think about it too much. I knew why now, too. There really was something—unusual—about the way I was set up in life. But far more unusual had been my attitude toward it—for how long? I was perspiring profusely now. There had to be something odd involved. Somehow, I knew that they weren’t disability payments. I didn’t know what the hell they were, and I didn’t want to know. I realized that I was afraid to find out. I was so damned scared that I would do almost anything to keep from knowing. Yet—
Cora slipped down into a sitting position beside me, extending her legs, long and tanned, feet dangling. We both regarded the rippling waterway, alternately dark and shiny as we slid from shade to light, more Rorschach than magic mirror, I suppose, for she saw nothing of my fears.
“I don’t suppose it’s anything actually sinister,” she mused softly. Then, after a time, she added, “But you said that your family isn’t wealthy?”
I nodded, only half-hearing, now that some crisis had passed. She had scored a sort of victory and we both knew it, though neither of us could say what, and I was only beginning to see how. For me, she sang beyond the genius of the sea. I knew that I could never go back to being exactly the same person I had been only a little while ago. I shuddered, and then I took hold of her hand. We continued to watch the water, and the pain in my head subsided.
There was a moment of crystal clarity, and then I could almost see the pine and the spruce towering around us instead of the mangrove. I could smell and hear the forest instead of the salt splashing ocean fluttering its empty sleeves.
For the first time in a long while—years, I suppose—I wanted to go back home.
“Cora?”
“Yes?”
“Fly home with me and meet the family?”
Oh! Blessed rage for order…
Chapter 2
icket? Ticket…?
Ticket.