“I’m considering that possibility.”
“It was a mistake for you to come. These meetings never mean anything.”
“It has been a mistake from the beginning,” she said sadly.
“I’m not altogether sure, but I don’t think so,” he said.
Stooping down, she took off her sneakers and handed them to him. It was only when she was almost over the railing that he figured out what she was doing.
In a long dive she cleared the yacht and started swimming for the shore a few hundred yards away.
“Someone stop her,” A.D. yelled.
“It’s okay,” Wesley said calmly. “She swims like a seal.”
A.D. was furious. “If we had a camera we could get that shot. It’s a one-in-a-million shot.”
“It’s a meaningless shot if you don’t know what you’re doing, and if you had a camera she wouldn’t have come.”
“You blew it with Toulouse,” A.D. said. “It was a bad time to split because the next scene was his favorite. You remember the party at the Frenchman’s house in Mazatlán? You listed your favorite films and were vicious about other directors, putting down the whole business. Then that South American critic busted you for not having any dignity.”
A sailor had run down from the bridge and was yelling for the captain but Evelyn had already reached the dock and was climbing up an outside ladder.
Wesley called out to the sailor: “It’s a bet we have on. Don’t worry about it. It was prearranged.”
The sailor went below to report to Toulouse.
“Some woman you have there,” A.D. said. “A real animal. Does this mean it’s quits between you two?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, she’s a bummer for the project. I’ve never heard that woman put in a good word for you.”
“I suppose not.”
“As one of your partners and all-time fans, I sure hope you can hang in there. With Toulouse, I mean. . He’ll pick up the tab and give us a location trip to India. That way we can shoot you finding Clementine and reuniting with Walker as well. You know how much this means to Walker. That boy has worked his guts out being on the trail of this story. Right now he’s probably up there in Albany with one of those religious fanatics. There’s nothing he’s not going to do to make a connection with you. I don’t see how we can let him down. I believe in this project, Wesley. This is it for me. I waited my whole life to find this one.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Maybe that’s true,” A.D. said quickly. “Maybe you’re not interested. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still keep it alive. Blow a little smoke up Toulouse’s ass. Sidney and I have put a lot of time on this project. We haven’t been drawing wages either. We’re going for broke. And you might not know it, but life on the street isn’t too colorful these days.”
Wesley felt a quick slice of pain in his shoulder and a shortening of his breath and he leaned against a bulkhead and waited until the sensation passed. “I’m not feeling all that well,” he said. “I’m going to lie down in a cabin somewhere. You do whatever you have to with Toulouse. I don’t care. Just don’t tell me about it.”
“That’s good enough for me,” A.D. said.
He helped Wesley go below and find an empty cabin. Then he went back to Toulouse and tried to make a deal.
23
AS SOON as they docked, Toulouse’s chauffeur drove Wesley back to his hotel. Evelyn had not arrived yet and he sat for a while on the living room couch with the lights off. He was still numb and disoriented, but much of the dread had slacked off and suddenly he just wanted to get out. He wanted to leave this darkened room and then the hotel and then no doubt the city and after that it wouldn’t matter. He went into the bedroom and packed a bag. He had three thousand dollars in cash and he left five hundred for Evelyn and wrote her a check for five thousand more. “Going North” he wrote on a room service menu and left it on the bed. Then he took the elevator to the street and walked aimlessly down Fifth Avenue. After forty blocks he took a cab to the airport, but it wasn’t until he told the driver to stop at Air Canada that he fully realized he was leaving the country. The first flight available was to Montreal and when he arrived it was ten at night.
He booked a room at the Holiday Inn and slept all that night and the next day and night, and when he awoke the following morning he knew what he was going to do. In a department store he bought a large duffel bag and filled it full of long underwear, wool shirts and pants, and other durable clothes suitable for the far north. Then he took a cab to the airport, booking a flight to Stephenville, Newfoundland, where he hired a float plane. The float plane took off straight into a vicious sunset, and thirty minutes later Wesley recognized the blunt shape of Slab Island squatting in the Gulf of St. Lawrence like a massive battleship. There was still enough light to distinguish a small pod of finback whales making their way north toward the Strait of Belle Isle. When he was a child the Inuit had killed them just for muktuk, the slabs of skin and blubber they loved to chew on, and it moved him now to see the whales passing the island. The plane flew over French Tickle, the long narrow fiord cutting into the heart of the island. Beneath him were forests of fir and black spruce and the same barrens where he had slogged through miles of bogs and lichen heaths hunting for caribou and moose. He thought about the island and how little it had changed. Fewer changes than he had gone through in his life. No doubt. First there had been the Portuguese whalers who had been forced to winter there. After them had come the trappers and shipwrecked sailors, and then the Inuit and Beotucks, attracted by all the action, had drifted in to trade. The only change after that was a hundred years later when the Brethren of the Moravian Church, unable to resist one of the bleakest places on earth, firmly planted their message on the simplicity and total practicality of God and never left.
It was the white frame structure of the Moravian Church that Wesley looked for as they banked and flew in directly over the long wooded bay. When it wasn’t there he panicked and thought of his namesake, the eighteenth-century convert John Wesley, who had witnessed the profound calm of the Moravians on a voyage from England to the New World. Faced with a violent storm off the coast of Labrador, the ecstatic pilgrims had sung hymns in terrifying transports of joy as the sea poured over the gunwales and the mainsail split in two.
Wesley took a pull from his half-empty bottle of rum and quoted John Wesley’s observation of the Moravians to the pilot: “I can conceive of no difference between a smooth and a rough sea, except that which is between a mind calmed by the love of God and one torn by the storms of earthly passions.”
The pilot nodded pleasantly at the old drunk as the pontoons settled gently over the water and they sped across the bay toward Tilt Cove, a settlement sheltered from the north wind by somber granite cliffs.
There was only one boat out, a small open dory, and the young boy standing at the tiller waved to them as they passed.
“Going home?” the pilot asked.
“Going home,” Wesley said.
“You’d have to pay me to live in a place like this.” The pilot feathered his engine and brought the plane around so that it glided up against the wooden dock.
The usual crowd of kids and old-timers were waiting for the plane. One of the old-timers recognized Wesley.
“It’s Wes Hardin.”
“Well it is.”
“Been on the outside a good long time.”
“In the States, from what I heard.”
“He’ll be going to the house.”
“I guess. Where else would he go?”