He wanted to escape.
There were a great many tools in the shop. He silently weighed each one against the rifles carried by Clyde and Harry. He had no idea what kind of rifles they were, but they looked uncommonly deadly. He imagined they were capable of putting rather large holes in a person, especially if a person were foolish enough to come charging across the room with something like, well, a monkey wrench in his hand. No, the tools were out, even if he could get to them, which he couldn’t possibly since some of them were on the workbench where Clyde sat and the others were hanging on the pegboard clear across the room behind the racked outboards. No.
“Marvin?” his mother said.
“What is it, Mom?”
“What are they doing here?”
“Who?” Marvin asked. His gaze had moved to a wall calendar to the left of the workbench, advertising a hardware store in Key West and showing a photograph of a seminude girl on a surfboard.
“These men.”
“I don’t know.”
“If it’s a holdup, why don’t they hold us up already?”
“Maybe they’ve got something bigger in mind,” Marvin said.
“Like what?”
Marvin shrugged. His scrutiny had shifted from the calendar to the open door in the half wall, and then to the shelves on the wall beyond. “Maybe a bank,” he said. There were parts manuals on the shelves, and several soiled rags.
“A bank where? There’s no bank here,” his mother said.
“Maybe the next town.” He shrugged again. “Mom, I don’t know what they want.”
“Could it be the post office?” Rachel asked. “There’s a post office next door on Big Pine. They keep money in post offices, don’t they?”
“Uh-huh,” Marvin said. He was examining the outboard motors on their racks now, the socket wrenches spread before them on an open cloth carrying bag. Several packing crates containing parts were against the pegboard wall on the far end of the shop, and a boat’s propeller was resting on its side near some stacked gasoline cans. What looked like a short mast was standing in the corner. Three opened packing crates were near the bow of the boat, excelsior overflowing their wooden edges. The boat on its cradle hid almost the entire wall on the left side of the shop.
“But not so much,” his mother said.
“Not so much what?”
“Money.”
“Where?”
“In post offices.”
“Oh. No, I guess not.”
“Keep quiet there,” Harry warned. “Both of you.”
A closed door with a hand-lettered sign, TOILET, was in the corner of the room behind the boat’s stem, and hanging to the left of the door was a fire extinguisher. The wall where Marvin sat began just there, with the overhead doors behind him and running almost the entire width of the room, stopping some three feet short of the joining perpendicular wall. A short row of shelves occupied those three feet. The shelves were laden with cans of paint and varnish, bottles of what seemed to be either turpentine or paint thinner. On one of the shelves several brushes with drilled handles were hanging in a pan of water.
The workbench was against the adjacent wall. Harry was leaning against one end, near the vise. Clyde was sitting on the bench, his feet off the floor, his rifle across his lap. There were some tools and paintbrushes and wood chips on the bench itself. On the wall behind the bench there were more shelves with cans and bottles. Under the bench there were two Coca-Cola cases, one of them containing only empty bottles. That was it. Several feet past the bench was the hardware store calendar, which was just about where Marvin had come in.
He could see nothing that he could use, and the lack of a weapon, the lack of an idea, the lack of a workable attack frustrated him enormously. Exactly opposite him, across the room on one of the oil drums Amos had carried over, his wife Selma sat against the white pegboard wall, white blouse, white skirt, white against white. She caught his gaze. She looked at him questioningly. For a moment he felt something close to what he must have felt a long long time ago, when Selma Rosen was sixteen years old and a junior at Evander Childs High School. He returned the questioning look, but a larger question was in his eyes, the question that had been troubling him for the better part of a year now, the question he had carried inside him day and night. Where do we go from here, Selma? What do we do with this marriage of ours that has gone stale and rotten? What do we do, Selma? How do we get out of it without destroying each other?
He turned his head aside.
His gaze came to rest on the fire extinguisher hanging alongside the door to the toilet.
He supposed he could reach for the extinguisher and, well, wait, he would need some excuse to take him over to that side of the shop — why not the bathroom? He could tell Harry he wanted to go to the bathroom and then he could grab the extinguisher from the wall and turn it full on Harry’s face and, sure, they’d shoot him full of holes before he even got the damn thing off the wall. And even if he did manage to get it before anyone saw him, he’d still have to come clear across the room with it before he could hope; the hell with it.
He became angry with the stupidity of the idea, and then irrationally angry with the fire extinguisher itself. Because it could not serve his purpose — escape — he immediately berated its ability to serve any purpose whatever. It seemed too small for a room this size, and it probably hadn’t been checked or refilled in years. How could it possibly function effectively if a fire broke out? He moved his eyes toward the shelves of paint and varnish and thinner and turpentine, toward the gasoline cans stacked near the rear wall, toward the oil drums, toward the excelsior sticking out of the packing crates, and his anger at the extinguisher turned to something bordering on anxiety. He suddenly hoped no one was smoking, and he felt instantly relieved when he glanced around the room again and saw no lighted cigars or cigarettes. If a fire broke
Fire, he thought.
It became something more than a word almost at once, flaming into his mind in a self-igniting flash of inspiration.
Fire.
Cautiously, because the idea had been conceived in searing intensity and accepted immediately as workable; cautiously, because he did not wish to arouse the slightest suspicion now that he had come upon something he could use; cautiously, he took his handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose, and allowed his gaze to drift toward the three-foot section of shelves on his right. He discounted the cans of paint at once. Paint was inflammable, yes, but not particularly volatile. He needed something that would give him immediate and sudden flame, something that could be ignited in an instant. For a terrifying moment he wondered whether or not the clear colorless liquid in the half-gallon bottles on the middle shelf was water. No, he thought, please. It’s not water, it can’t be water.
He closed his mind like a trap.
The clear colorless liquid in those two bottles was either turpentine or paint thinner.
“Don’t be so angry,” Bobby Colmore said to Dr. Tannenbaum.
“They make me angry,” Tannenbaum answered at the top of his voice, glaring at Harry.
“It doesn’t pay to get angry with these kind of men,” Bobby said. He was very angry himself. He was so angry that his hands were trembling, and to hide their trembling he had put them behind his back. He had been offering advice to himself more than to Tannenbaum, knowing that every time he got angry he began drinking, and every time he began drinking it only made him angrier. There were two quart bottles of bourbon back in his room on the shelf over his bed near the picture of Ava Gardner, but they wouldn’t do any good if he got angry here in the paint shop. He tried to control his anger by talking to Tannenbaum, but Tannenbaum was so angry himself, with veins standing out on his jaw and with his hands clenched, that it did no good at all to talk to him. In fact, Bobby was afraid that Tannenbaum’s anger would jump right over into his own, like electricity leaping from one terminal to another.