“Good idea.”
“Who, me?” Reemstma said. He was flustered. He looked around in surprise.
“How about it, Eddie?”
He could not tell if they were serious. It was all offhanded—the way Grant had been picked from obscurity one evening when he was sitting on a bench in St. Louis. He murmured something in protest. His face had become red.
Other names were being proposed. Reemstma felt his heart pounding. He had stopped saying, no, no, and sat there, mouth open a bit in bewilderment. He dared not look around him. He shook his head slightly, no. A hand went up, “I move that the nominations be closed.”
Reemstma felt foolish. They had tricked him again. He felt as if he had been betrayed. No one was paying any attention to him. They were counting raised hands.
“Come on, you can’t vote,” someone said to his wife.
“I can’t?” she said.
Wandering around as the afternoon ended Reemstma finally caught sight of Kit Walker. She acted a little strange. She didn’t seem to recognize him at first. There was a grass stain on the back of her white skirt.
“Oh, hello,” she said.
“I was looking for you.”
“Would you do me a favor?” she said. “Would you mind getting me a drink? My husband seems to be ignoring me.”
Though Reemstma did not see it, someone else was ignoring her, too. It was Hilmo, standing some way off. They had taken care to come back to the pavilion separately. Friends who would soon be parting were talking in small groups, their faces shadowy against the water that glistened behind them. Reemstma returned with some wine in a plastic glass.
“Here you are. Is anything wrong?”
“Thank you. No, why? You know, you’re very nice,” she said. She had noticed something over his shoulder. “Oh, dear.”
“What?”
“Nothing. It looks like we’re going.”
“Do you have to?” he managed to say.
“Rick’s over by the door. You know him, he hates to be kept waiting.”
“I was hoping we could talk.”
He turned. Walker was standing outside in the sunlight. He was wearing an aloha shirt and tan slacks. He seemed somewhat aloof. Reemstma was envious of him.
“We have to drive back to Belvoir tonight,” she said.
“I guess it’s a long way.”
“It was very nice meeting you,” she said.
She left the drink untouched on the corner of the table. Reemstma watched her make her way across the floor. She was not like the others, he thought. He saw them walking to their car. Did she have children? he found himself wondering. Did she really find him interesting?
In the hour before twilight, at six in the evening, he heard the noise and looked out. Crossing the area toward them was the unconquerable schoolboy, long-legged as a crane, the ex-infantry officer now with a small, well-rounded paunch, waving both arms.
Dunning was bellowing from a window, “Hooknose!”
“Look who I’ve got!” Klingbeil called back.
He was with Devereaux, the tormented scholar. Their arms were around each other’s shoulders. They were crossing together, grinning, friends since cadet days, friends for life. They started up the stairs.
“Hooknose!” Dunning shouted.
Klingbeil threw open his arms in mocking joy.
He was the son of an army officer. As a boy he had sailed on the Matson Line and gone back and forth across the country. He told stories of seduction in the lower berth. My son, my son, she was moaning. He was irredeemable, he had the common touch, his men adored him. Promoted slowly, he had gotten out and become a land developer. He drove a green Cadillac famous in Tampa. He was a king of poker games, drinking, late nights.
She had probably not meant it, Reemstma was thinking. His experience had taught him that. He was not susceptible to lies.
“Oh,” wives would say, “of course. I think I’ve heard my husband talk about you.”
“I don’t know your husband,” Reemstma would say.
A moment of alarm.
“Of course, you do. Aren’t you in the same class?”
He could hear them downstairs.
“Der Schiff ist kaputt!” they were shouting. “Der Schiff ist kaputt!”
AKHNILO
It was late August. In the harbor the boats lay still, not the slightest stirring of their masts, not the softest clink of a sheave. The restaurants had long since closed. An occasional car, headlights glaring, came over the bridge from North Haven or turned down Main Street, past the lighted telephone booths with their smashed receivers. On the highway the discotheques were emptying. It was after three.
In the darkness Fenn awakened. He thought he had heard something, a slight sound, like the creak of a spring, the one on the screen door in the kitchen. He lay there in the heat. His wife was sleeping quietly. He waited. The house was unlocked though there had been many robberies and worse nearer the city. He heard a faint thump. He did not move. Several minutes passed. Without making a sound he got up and went carefully to the narrow doorway where some stairs descended to the kitchen. He stood there. Silence. Another thump and a moan. It was Birdman falling to a different place on the floor.
Outside, the trees were like black reflections. The stars were hidden. The only galaxies were the insect voices that filled the night. He stared from the open window. He was still not sure if he had heard anything. The leaves of the immense beech that overhung the rear porch were close enough to touch. For what seemed a long time he examined the shadowy area around the trunk. The stillness of everything made him feel visible but also strangely receptive. His eyes drifted from one thing to another behind the house, the pale Corinthian columns of the arbor next door, the mysterious hedge, the garage with its rotting sills. Nothing.
Eddie Fenn was a carpenter though he’d gone to Dartmouth and majored in history. Most of the time he worked alone. He was thirty-four. He had thinning hair and a shy smile. Not much to say. There was something quenched in him. When he was younger it was believed to be some sort of talent, but he had never really set out in life, he had stayed close to shore. His wife, who was tall and nearsighted, was from Connecticut. Her father had been a banker. Of Greenwich and Havana the announcement in the papers had said—he’d managed the branch of a New York bank there when she was a child. That was in the days when Havana was a legend and millionaires committed suicide after smoking a last cigar.
Years had passed. Fenn gazed out at the night. It seemed he was the only listener to an infinite sea of cries. Its vastness awed him. He thought of all that lay concealed behind it, the desperate acts, the desires, the fatal surprises. That afternoon he had seen a robin picking at something near the edge of the grass, seizing it, throwing it in the air, seizing it again: a toad, its small, stunned legs fanned out. The bird threw it again. In ravenous burrows the blind shrews hunted ceaselessly, the pointed tongues of reptiles were testing the air, there was the crunch of abdomens, the passivity of the trapped, the soft throes of mating. His daughters were asleep down the hall. Nothing is safe except for an hour.
As he stood there the sound seemed to change, he did not know how. It seemed to separate as if permitting something to come forth from it, something glittering and remote. He tried to identify what he was hearing as gradually the cricket, cicada, no, it was something else, something feverish and strange, became more clear. The more intently he listened, the more elusive it was. He was afraid to move for fear of losing it. He heard the soft call of an owl. The darkness of the trees which was absolute seemed to loosen, and through it that single, shrill note.