Elzee lied as usual. The ditch is no more than five feet deep, but it is dry and unchoked and walkable at a stoop. The worst part is near the cattle guard, where it rises to within two feet of the bars. Through the briars on hands and knees, cradling the carbine in my elbows Ecuador-style.
It takes ten minutes to reach the woods.
Once again in deep shade and walking is possible, through little bare swales and hollows studded with cypress knees, all the while angling gradually toward the water and diverging from the raised shell road. My objective is the marina some two hundred feet upstream from the clubhouse. My face, elbows, and knees are scratched, but I don’t feel bad.
Aiming for a point on the bayou where, as I recall, the bank curves out and anchors the downstream end of the docks.
A piece of luck: a gleam of white directly ahead. It is fresh white sand deposited under willows that run out in a towhead. Here is both cover and footing where I expected muck.
My knees make musical rubs in the sharp cool shearing sand, which is wet only on top. Not bad: I missed the end of the marina by no more than a few yards, hitting the lower docks at the fourth slip. This end of the dock is unroofed and low-lying, designed for skiffs and canoes. A reef of alligator grass runs in front of the slips. Mullet jump. Gold dust drifts on the black water. The bayou is brimming from a south wind. Upstream, yachts and power boats drift in their moorings. Sunlight shatters like quicksilver against their square sterns.
I lie at the edge of the willows and watch. Three hundred yards upstream, at a point, two men are pole-fishing in the outside curve. A peaceful sight — but here’s an oddity. Their caps are the long-billed mesh-crowned kind Midwesterners wear, pulled low, shadowing their faces; but they fish Negro-style from the bank out, poles flat Something wrong here: Michiganders don’t fish like that and Negroes don’t wear caps like that.
From their spot on the outer curve I calculate that they command two reaches of the bayou.
The next-but-last slip was a child’s pirogue of warped plywood. It is unlocked and dry. Next to it floats a locked canoe with a paddle.
Reach the pirogue, keeping lower than the alligator grass, and slip downstream lying on my back and paddling with both hands. Now past the reef of grass but under cover of the cyrilla and birch, which, caving and undermined, slant toward the water. A smell of roots and fresh-sloughed earth.
Once round the bend and out of sight of the fishermen, it is safe enough to sit up and paddle straight to the water entrance at the rear of the clubhouse — but now! Downstream now, at the next point, sit another brace of fishermen, faces shaded, poles flat out!
Did they see me? Hardly, because I’m already behind the Humble yacht tied the length of the club dock and standing off just enough, two feet to let me slip between. I can’t see the fantail above me where white-coated waiters would ordinarily be serving up frozen drinks to Humble bigshots. But today there is no sound but the slap of water. The yacht I reason, must be empty because the ports are closed and the air-conditioning is silent The cabins must be like ovens. Turning now into the dark boathouse that runs under the ground-level floor of the clubhouse.
Wedging the pirogue between the dock and the high water, I climb up, keeping an eye peeled for the fishermen. But the yacht blocks the entire boathouse. Anyhow, it is too dark to be seen under here.
Up the concrete service stairs, little used at best but which ascend, I know, into a kind of pantry between the kitchen and the men’s bar. (I was on the Building Committee.) If the sniper is still in the pro shop and the rest of the building is empty, it should be possible to slide open the panel at the rear of the bar where golfers in the pro shop are served, so saving the floors from their spikes (my sole contribution to the Building Committee).
Silence, the keeping of it, is the problem. The door at the top of the stairs is open a crack. I stand on the landing listening. The kitchen sounds empty. It roars with silence and ticks away like any kitchen in the morning. No motors run. A bird hops on the roof.
Will the door creak? Yes. But it can be opened silently, I discover, by warping it open, pushing high with one hand and pulling low with the other. The pantry is dark, darker than the Bayou Bar because the window in the swinging door makes a faint gray diamond. I look through, first from one side then the other, using the obliquest possible angle without touching the door. The bar is empty, but the far door into the main hall is open. The Portuguese fishnet droops from the ceiling, its glass floats gleaming like soap bubbles in the dim light.
Test the swinging door for creaking. No creaks up to ten inches. Ten inches is enough.
Slip along pecky cypress wall to hinged section of bar. Don’t lift, go under — damn! I trip and almost fall. Forgot the raised slatting on the floor to save the barman’s feet. Will the slatting creak? Yes. Try the nailed joints. No creak. The quality of the silence is different here. A more thronging, peopled silence — as thick as last Christmas Eve’s party. Perhaps it is the acoustic effect of the bottles.
The panel opening into the pro shop is closed. Take a full minute to unsling carbine and prop it against the cushioned edge of the bar. Wait and blink and get used to the light.
Listen.
The leather dice cup is in place, worn and darkened by sweat and palm oil. The bottles are visible now, the front row fitted with measuring spouts. Whitish tendrils of vine have sprouted through the simulated wormholes and twined around the necks of the bottles. I blink. Something is wrong. What? Then I see. What is wrong is that nothing is wrong. The bottles are intact and undrunk.
Someone clears his throat, so close that my breath catches. I open my throat and let my breath out carefully.
The sound comes from behind me, behind the panel.
Again the hawking: I breathe easier. It is a careless habituated sound, deep-throated and resonant with blown-out cheeks, the sound of a man who has been alone for some time.
A chair creaks. Something — its front legs? — hits the floor.
I listen — for a second man and to place the first. If you know a man, you can recognize his voice in his throat-clearings.
French windows, I remember, open from the pro shop onto a putting green. Beyond, the shell drive winds through the links and joins the main road. A hundred yards farther is the gate and the guardhouse.
How does the panel fit in its frame? Does it run on channel bearings? Test its hang by putting a finger into the finger recess. The panel sits, simply, in a wooden slot. Test lateral motion: a faint grate. Lubricate it. With what? spit? No, Benedictine. The liqueur pours like 40-weight oil. Test again. The panel moves an eighth-inch with a slight mucous squeak.
More hawking and throat-clearing. I do not recognize the voice. Wait for a long hawk and slide the panel a quarter-inch. But the panel clears the frame by no more than a crack: a bright line of light but not wide enough to see anything.
Another hawk, another quarter-inch.
I can see him but it’s the wrong man: Gene Sarazen in plus fours and slanted forty-five degrees to the floor. To my nostrils comes the smell of spike-splintered pine floor and of sweated leather. The sunlight is bright. I can hear the open window.
The hawking again but now I can also hear the liquid sound of throat muscles swallowing — and even a light click of the uvula popping clear of the tongue.
Ahem.
I reflect: better get the carbine in position now rather than later. The problem now is balance and position, clearing shelf space for my elbows. I calculate he is sitting ten or fifteen feet to the left of my line of sight and that the panel must be opened two or three inches to take the carbine at this angle.